I'd like to know what type of card I could get away with for HDV editing. Meaning that I've seen some very good deals on laptops with powerful dual core processors that unfortunately come with a gimpy graphics cards.

It's really a shame having such a powerful CPU with an underpowered integrated gfx card.

In any event, I'd like to know if I got one of these lowly gfx cards, such as ATI Express series, will this totally kill or make HDV video editing very painful. My idea would be to use firewire external drives for storage and get about 2GB of main memory.

Mike

This actually really depends on the application you use to edit HDV. If you're using Premiere, it can benefit from a high end graphics card. Typically the NVidia Quatro cards are your best bet but the higher end 7900, 7950, 7900GS type cards are good as well. ATI's XT1900 range is solid as well.

If you're using Sony Vegas, Edius, etc. Very little is used by the graphics accelerator and something basic in your $125 - $150 range would probably suffice.

Jon

Do you know if Sony Vegas pushes the video card at all? The video cards in laptops are even slower than the $100 variety in desktops.

Mike

From what I've read around here, it doesn't use it a whole lot. Where this would come in to play possibly though is in playback of exported video. Better video cards are obviously going to do a better job.

Jon

Integrated graphics shouldn't be a problem for Vegas... it doesn't affect rendering speed or anything like that.

Thanks for the response, it's much appreciated.

Regarding playback, what do I need from that perspective? I think it will be able to play HDV o.k., but the new AVCHD. Will it be a problem? It's been even more demanding that HDV playback on my current machine.

Mark

I use a Geforce 7900GS card and purchased the PureVideo $20 plug-in from NVidia. This combination on my system doesn't have any problems playing back anything.

I use a Geforce 7900GS card and purchased the PureVideo $20 plug-in from NVidia. This combination on my system doesn't have any problems playing back anything.

I'm glad your high end card is able to play AVCHD, but I'm wanting to know where the floor is, what's the lowest power card I can get away with.

Assumption Vegas doesn't depend on gfx card to work, just need enough power to playback video.

Intel graphics media accelerator 950 - probably out
NVidia Go 6150 - maybe, very questionable
Go 7200 - probable but would like confirmation.

Mark