For a few projects I'm looking to take the leap into on-site production with CS3's OnLocation (I also have Cineform). Looking for good recommendation on a laptop, or specs for a laptop, and additional equipment I might need to live-produce two V1U's (which can take advantage of 1920X1080 via the HDMI through Blackmagic card, but don't know if there's an equivilent for laptop, etc.). Laptops at BestBuy (etc.) show a number of quad-cores... 2 GB Ram... with a number of chip varieties... Intel, etc. Any help! THANKS!

Hi Greg,

For HDV, all I can say is the more CPU horsepower, the better. I've been using an Athlon 64 3400+ laptop a gig of memory and a 5400 rpm drive. This has worked great with SD footage. With HDV I have to scale down the display (half res, etc.) to get acceptable performance but it's working for me.

BTW, in case you don't know, OnLocation was originally called DV Rack. You'll find more help on this over in the 'Direct-to-disk Recording Solutions' forum.

-Dan

I can only speak from experience and both my HP ZD7000 and now HP DV9000 are champs. Both used on a project with 75 hours of footage from capture (Scenalyzer) to categorizing and edit (Prpro 2.0) to color correcting (AE 7 with Color Finesse in 32bit color space, migrated to DV9000 after Color Correction) to 5.1 surround sound mixing (Audition and Prpro) to encoding and DVD Authoring (Encore 2). I personally would recommend the HP Pavilion HDX which sports a 20" screen, 4GB RAM, 7200 240GB HD, 512MB Video Card, but only 1680x1050 resolution (HP is working on releasing a full HD res soon). I've been reading initial reviews and benchmarks and this thing is fast but at a price though. Personally I will wait for native 64bit Adobe software and hopefully QuadCore laptops before I get another machine. Oh yeah, get it through Coscto and you'll have a 3 month unconditional warranty. Good luck.

http://www.costco.com/CTO/HPConfigurator.aspx?Prodid=10029570&search=990012&Mo=0&cm_re=1_en-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&lang=en-US&Nr=P_CatalogName%3aBC&Sp=S&N=0&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=Text_Search&Dr=P_CatalogName%3aBC&Ne=4000000&D=990012&Ntt=990012&No=0&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nty=1&topnav=&s=1&model=RW031AV

I ultimately picked up a Fujitsu 6420 with 17" screen, 2Ghz Pentium, core dual, 2gb ram, 200GB Raid 0 hard drive, etc.
Also picked up an external Seagate Free Agent 750GB for backing up to, as well as a LaCie 1TB Raid 0 for production files.
I like it because that 17" display is just outstanding in its clarity, the build quality and materials are very good, probably one of the better built laptopds out there. It seemed as though it would be relatively durable. It does weigh 10 pounds, too.

Installed CS3 Master Collection late last week, have not played with it much yet, but enough to know I'm going back to XP Pro, and DUMPING Vista.

My advice is to start by getting a copy of XP Pro to load on the new machine. It takes a lot less resources to run smoothly than Vista. Whichever machine you choose, don't run Vista. Go "back" to XP. Vista really seems to hold it back.

Another hot laptop that I honestly just could not afford at the time is the Dell XPS 1740 (???) or some similar number. One with the same specs as the Fuji ran just over $3k. Dell still offers XP on their higher end laptops, although not for much longer from what I understand.

What's conventional wisdom on the optimal (PC) chip for multi-media editing-- the Intel Quadcore? Athlon X2? Centrino?

Intel Quad core, I would go with that.

For what it's worth, the guy's over at Video Guys recommend Intel over AMD.

I'm running an Asus G2s as editing machine

* T7500 2.4 ghz dual core intel
* 4gb RAM
* Geforce 8600M
* 7200rpm 200gb disk
* 17" wide bright screen

Works very well - won't cost you a fortune

// Lazze