Toshiba Notebook as NLE station with Premiere CS3?

[Dominik Vanyi]

Hi everyone and thx. for reading this,

I am at the moment thinking about my options with regard to a computer for NLE. And I am seeking your advise on the following questions:

For me it is mandatory that my NLE computer is portable and that it runs some Windows flavor – XP or Vista. So its gonna be a notebook. Since I live in the 3rd world where options and support is limited I am tending towards buying a Toshiba notebook, as I have good experience with 5 Toshiba notebooks which I used in the last 10 years.

Now the problem with notebooks is that if one component (such as the firewire port or graphic card) is not compatible with either the XHA1 or Premiere it is difficult or impossible to change that component. I am unfortunately also not in the position to try out the notebook and see if I can capture through its firewire port and edit on Premiere CS3.

So my first question would be if anyone has had any experience with capturing (and editing) XHA1 footage on a Toshiba Notebook. I am trying to determine if the firewire ports are OK to talk to the XHA1. Anyone successfully captured XHA1 footage in Premiere on a Toshiba notebook ?

Second question: I will most likely use Premiere CS3 for editing. The hardware specs listed on Adobe’s website say that the monitor must be 1,280 x 1,024 or bigger. What will happen if the monitor of say 15” is only 1,280 x 800 ? Will I not see anything at all and or Premiere refuse to work ? I anyway plan to have a larger 19” or 20” external monitor but if I am on the road and cant use the external monitor does that mean I wont be able to work at all on the internal 15” monitor ?

Third question: Again the specs for Premiere CS3 say I will need a 7200 Rpm harddisk. Most of the internal HDs in notebooks are (much) slower than that. Therefore I was planning to buy an external HD, which I connect via USB2 to the notebook. But again my question is what happens if I am on the road and cant use the external HD. Will Premiere still be able to capture from the XHA1 to the slow 5200 Rpm harddisk or will it not work at all ?
Side question: Is a USB2 connected external 7200 Rpm harddisk a wise option ? Is USB2 going to be the bottleneck or does it give me enough throughput ?

Third question: Most Toshiba Notebooks that would be available to me only have graphics cards with 128 MB internal memory. Whereas the Premiere CS3 hardware specs say I need at least 256 MB memory on the graphics card. What will happen if I only use a graphics card with 128 MB ? Will Premiere still allow me to work and edit ?

I need to research my options very carefully coz if I buy the wrong notebook I cant return it and the money would have been wasted coz this notebook is going to be only for NLE. Therefore any insights you may be able to provide would be greatly appreciated.

Dominik
www.d-imijis.com

[Jim Andrada]

I've been using Toshiba notebooks since they only had black and white screens and IBM had yet to introduce their own notebook PC's

And I still use them.

I don't have the combination you're asking about though, so the only relevant comment I can make is that I think performance of the internal hard drive will be the biggest limitation. Processors and memory are probably not the gating factors, but I think the disk will limit you. Have you looked into some of the small external hard drives? I have a couple of 2 1/2 inch units that I use for audio recording that have both USB and firewire ports and are small enough that I always carry one with me. I think they perform better than what's inside the PC.

[Dominik Vanyi]

Jim,

You say you use Toshiba NBs but not the particular combination. Have you ever successfully connected the XHA1 to any Toshiba notebook ?

You are right about the HD being the most likely bottleneck and I shall certainly get myself an external drive.

Cheers - D!

[Jim Andrada]

Dominic

Sorry, I only have Canon GL2 and JVC HD110 so can't speak to any other camera combination

But I'd be surprised if there were any camera specific reason that you couldn't capture to the Toshiba. I think the hardware has less to do with it than the software.

Of course I could always be wrong.

[Brian Brown]

Dominik, a USB 2.0 drive is a big bottleneck in its own right. A much faster external solution is an eSATA enclosure with a SATA 7,200rpm drive and an eSATA card in your laptop. The throughput is several times faster than USB 2.0.

But truthfully, unless you just HAVE to work on battery power, for an NLE workstation I would consider a small form factor PC over just about any flavor of laptop. Something like a Shuttle PC (micro-ATX) with a Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, a 10,000rpm system drive, and a 7,200 rpm video drive + 1 15" or 17" LCD. You'll spend less, have better I/O, and suffer less worries. Video is just so very demanding on the hardware.

My $0.02,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

[Dominik Vanyi]

Tx Brian,
eSATA card & external drive it is. I did not know that such a thing like an eSATA card for notebook exists.
Battery power is the least of my concerns. In fact I think that 95% of the time the notebook will not run on battery.
My objective for wanting to do NLE on a notebook is PORTABILITY.
Example: Soon I'll be traveling for 2 weeks to another country and stay in a hotel room. Part of the purpose of this journey will be that I can sit down quietly away from my office and family to deepen my skills of vdo editing. I'll have a bunch of books, training DVDs with me and wanna learn... but I need to have a working copy of Premiere / Photoshop / AfterFX on the notebook.
Another reason is that we do among other things wedding videos and because we are a major destination wedding location clients need their videos in 48 hours only. So speed is everything. Therefore again the notebook comes in handy coz the team members can bring the notebook home with them to work from at home.
I also do a lot of video work in very remote places - shooting company profiles for mining companies - again I'd love to be able to capture footage in the evening to see if all went well.

For the really demanding editing tasks I'll anyway most likely set up a major editing PC in the office.

Cheers - D!

[Alan Craig]

Dominic I use a Toshiba X200-20s note book Pinnacle studio Plus 11 and XHA1

Hard drives are only 5400 but have no problems I do not think HD speed is much of a problem as long as you have the processing power, lots of memory, fast graphics card. The X200 also outputs to HD DVD.

I have never seen any of the NLE minimum specs that I have looked at say that you need to use hard drives with a 7200 rpm speed but I have not seen all the NLE specs.

Alan

[Chris Smith]

Dominik - I use a Toshiba Qosmio. I have had no problems and the video card has 512 on it. If you are going to do NLE on a laptop you should "go big or go home" (at least that's what I do). I like to have plenty of extra headroom and the Qosmio line is great. Large screen and meant for A/V and Entertainment. Check them out.

[Alan Craig]

Dominik further to my last reply I have just downloaded vegas pro8 trial version and that does recomend using a hard drive with a 7200 rpm speed because some of the older 5400 speed might not be able to sustain the speed constant.

alan

[Dominik Vanyi]

Chris ,Alan,

Many, many thx. indeed. I feel encouraged by your posts. My main worry was that the Firewire component would fail on me. Once again guys your posts have helped me a lot.
The notebook Alan is using is not available in Asia, whereas the Qosmio is also available here.

Cheers - D!

[Harm Millaard]

All valid points that have been raised. The one I miss is the Toshiba brand. When I needed a new notebook, I asked my son what to get, since he is an experienced IT consultant and has lots of experience with various brands of notebooks. He practically FORBID me to buy Toshiba, since it was one of the worst notebooks with LOTS of quality problems. Good brands are Asus, Compaq, Dell, HP and Sony.

Personally, I found the suggestion for a Shuttle PC a very good one.

[Jim Andrada]

Funny, I've been using Toshiba since before notebooks had color screens and never a problem. Toshiba and IBM were the co-developers of the LCD flat panel technology through a joint venture called DTI (Display Technologies Inc) that was run by my former boss at IBM Japan, so I always gravitated to either IBM or Toshiba notebooks.

Of course times do change. I always buy domestic Japanese models, so there may be variations in build quality by market.

[Dave Robinson]

Completely off topic I guess, but you live in the most beautiful country on the planet!

Wanna trade places? Wales is.........nice.

[Mike McCarthy]

Screen resolution might be an issue. The Beta versions of Premiere CS3 refused to install on a system with less that 1024 lines of vertical resolution (1440x900 was a no go) but I am not sure if they fixed that before release. I recommend a 17" laptop with 1920x1200 pixels just because you will have more room to work. Paying the extra for a 7200rpm drive might be worth the value to you as well, if you plan to do a lot of editing. The firewire capture should not be a problem, that is why they standardize those things.