PowerNotebooks.com - Laptop & Notebook News & Articles
Links:Articles Home
Video/Graphics Category Index
Selecting the right laptop for Video Editing
23 September, 2009 in Video/Graphics
With Windows Movie Maker inspiring multitudes of amateur videographers, and because it will run on virtually any laptop, the use of laptop computers as home movie studios is becoming a more and more popular secondary, and even primary activity.
Today's powerful laptops make great portable video studios, but the first step if you're ready to move past Windows Movie Maker is to track down appropriate software and make sure you have enough power to run your chosen software.
The video editing forums primarily mention four applications for Windows: Adobe Premiere is the highest rated, Sony Vegas is the second highest, Windows Movie Maker is third, and Avid Media Composer is fourth, mainly because its $2,500 price limits it to professionals only.
With hardware requirements of a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM, Sony Vegas Pro is able to run on virtually anything, as is Windows Movie Maker, but Sony Vegas Pro is also able to take advantage of a multi-core or multi-processor environment, and runs best with at least 2 GB of RAM.
Adobe Premiere is a bit more demanding, with a 2 GHz processor being the baseline simply for editing digital video at all, and a dual core 2.8 GHz processor required for editing HD video. Adobe also calls for a minimum 2 GB of RAM, although professionals recommend as much as 8 GB.
Both applications require a 7,200 RPM hard drive for video editing, while Adobe Premiere will not edit HD content with anything less than a RAID 0 array (available with the Sager NP9280 and NP9850). Both applications also call for an IEEE 1394 port.
Adobe calls for either an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port or an Adobe-certified video card for capture and export to tape. The Adobe-certified capture card can be difficult to come by in a mobile environment. For example, the Video Media Solutions MVD-300 ExpressCard capture card - one of the few mobile cards certified by Adobe - retails for $2,800! Capture cards are only necessary, however, if an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) connection is not available to take data directly from a digital camcorder.
As far as encoding performance goes, both Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas are designed to take advantage of whatever hardware you can give them. Keep in mind that neither application actually cares whether or not you have a high-end graphics card - the processor and RAM are the important aspects.
In otherwise-identically configured desktop systems, an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 3.33 GHz processor took 277 seconds to encode two 30 second segments of HDV 1080p25 footage with a cross-dissolve transition applied across the entire 60 seconds. An Intel® Core™ 2 Quad 2.1 GHz processor encoded the same test in 199 seconds, while the very slowest Intel® Core™ i7-920 (2.8 GHz) encoded it in 70 seconds. The high-end Intel® Core™ i7-965 (3.33 GHz) completed the encoding within 66 seconds. As an interesting side note, even the slowest Intel® Core™ i7 was 100% faster than the fastest previous-generation Intel® Core™2 Quad Extreme QX9770 (3.2 GHz), which clocked 140 seconds. This speaks very favorably for the newly-released Intel® Core™ Mobile i7 (Calpella) processors.
Even if you can't afford the highest-end processors available, the new Intel® Core™ Mobile i7 (Calpella) processors will be a sound investment for your video editing rig, and even the slowest Intel® Core™ 2 Quad-core processor you can purchase encodes around 28% faster than the very fastest Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processors out there.
While notebooks running Adobe Premiere are not necessarily ideal as a primary capture device, captures done via HD camcorders are perfectly viable on a notebook, and the actual editing and encoding process is perfectly suited for taking on the go.
Please note that, while any notebook can handle normal digital content, editing HD content REQUIRES a notebook that supports RAID 0. Even lightning-fast SSD drives cannot keep up with the sustained data throughput needed for HD encoding and editing without being configured within a RAID 0 array.