Laptop Editing

[Chance1234]

OK i have got my new shiny laptop, only ting is i have only a 40gb hardrive,

and playing around with capturing so far im hitting at least 20 off meg a second!

I want more space!!! i have lots of ports on my machine and all and wonderful weird stuff

Ethernet, USB (isnt it great ?), Firewire,some card doobrie, infrared blyuetooth etc etc

i was thinking of buying a old PC and throwing in a real big hardrive and somehow networking my laptop , but im not a techy when it comes to this nay suggestions ?

[deanl]

Hey there.

Get an external hardrive for your laptop. Connect it up vie your firewire port and Roberts your mums sisters shag slave.

Despin out.

[andy_winton]

yep external firewire drive is what I did, but
you might hit a problem if you are using the
firewire port for both camera and disk access
at the same time. (you shouldn't but you might)

A cheaper solution might just be to get a
bigger disk for your laptop.

Or just make adverts.

[eddie]

You should be able to capture at a better rate than that. I have good clips captured at less than 2MEG per second.
Im sure 20 MEG /sec will be far higher quality than you need.
Or get an external firewire Hard Drive as recommended above.

[sn-films]

Regarding external storage, I currently have a couple of these that I'm using and I love 'em! I would definitely recommend looking into these.

http://www.lacie.com/products/produc...100090278D3ED0

[Chance1234]

firewire drives look cewl, iam capturing by firewire though which is built into my laptop, do i get another firewire adapter through USB or can i get some sort of splitter or something ?

[Chance1234]

just a copuple of more questions would a USB Hardrive be ok ?

also next question is how much space do i really need

basically i have a wedding video and a Kenyan video to do, , both i envisage capuytirng in total a maximum of 2 hours of footage. via my firewire port from the camera

im not an editor and have no real desire to be, but what i also want to do is use it to review rushes from MI and im looking at about at anyone time , low quality caputtre about 6 hours of footage.

finally anyone point us in a cheap place for external harddrives and for Adobe Add-Ins for premiere

[eddie]

first of all USB is considerably slower than firewire, so any capturing you do with USB in the loop (either connected to the video deck, or the hard drive you are saving to) will be lower quality, even if you get some sort of firewire/USB adapter.
I assume you only have one firewire port?
This means unless you can figure out some good capture settings you will have a nightmare job juggling files and equipment aroud to different ports.
perhaps the laptop have a 'video in' port?
Id recommend you use what you've got - watch the wedding footage, and only capture the scenes you want to use. Then edit and export to tape.
Then delete the files, and capture the kenyan footage (only the scenes you want to use) and do the same.
Since you arent editing MI on your laptop you can capture smaller low res images onto it. I dont know how much.
40 gig is a lot of disk space.

Otherwise I think you would have to compromise on the quality and try capturing through USB, with an external firewire drive.

Good luck.

[marknotgeorge]

Or you could buy a PC Card Firewire adapter. Gives you a couple of extra Firewire ports. Make sure it's suitable for video though, as some can be problematical.

[sn-films]

The LaCie firewire drive I listed above is designed to daisy-chain firewire devices (you're allowed up to 63 devices!). This means that you can plug the camera into the drive, and then plug the drive into your laptop.

To be safe, I would recomend capturing to a temporary location onto your laptop's local drive, and then moving the files onto the external drive.

FYI regarding USB... there are two USB standards. Firewire is definitely faster than USB 1.0, although I'm not sure about how it compares to the throughput on USB 2.0. Most new external USB drives support both architectures.