The ultimate photo/video laptop (for now)!

Alienware Area 51 and Aurora series laptops are probably the best performing laptops out there. For starters, the latest Intel or AMD chips(even the desktop chips like Intel P4 and Atlon 64) and Nvidia 7800GT graphics cards and to top it off, 2 100GB(5400rpm) or 120GB(7200rpm) drives running RAID 0 . I am so tempted by this thing except it would mean going to windoze. Still for PS work and just capturing video, I doubt any other laptop even comes close.

It's ugly, mean and heavy but baby what performance:

Alienware

Why would you want to run RAID0? It'll give you double the chance of a major crash and burn. Usually RAID0 also doesnt give you any gain in performance as data for a specific operation is usually fetched from 1 disk anyways, so unless you're doing a lot of parallel disk io operations its not going to help.

I would prefer to run such a laptop in raid1. It'll cost you half the diskspace, but at least you're quite safe from dataloss, and most raid1 implementations actually do stripe the data across both harddisks giving you better (read) performance.

Cor

Cor

it's more for capturing and working with HD video rendering (lots of I/O work). For mundane things like scratch disks etc RAID 0 is slow. But the bandwidth needed to capture DVCPRo HD etc RAID 0 is essential. I set up my home RAID array with SyncRAID,sorta like RAID 3 without the bottlenecks.

For photogs, having 240GB of storage and ability to work with them on PS with a fast scratch disk would be a great plus.

i have one of these laptops and they are way, way too heavy & get way, way too hot to take anywhere on location. they are basically a desktop shoved into a big laptop chassis.

so, unless you are tight on space at home, forget one of these and you could get a desktop (for home editing) and a useable laptop (for on location) cheaper than the alienware.

they are awesome bits of kit but just too damn heavy and get too hot imo.

I saw this thread and thought I might find answers to my questions. I am an intruder from the video part of this forum:). I am looking for a PORTABLE laptop (not obscenely huge or heavy) that can capture and edit HDV video. I spend much of me time traveling and dont' have much time at home to edit. Are there any laptop options that can can accomplish this and still be carried around without sherpas? Has anyone actually used a laptop for HDV editing that they woudl recommend?

Try this new notebook by ACER with the new yonah processor, 2gb ram etc

Acer Laptop

At 6.6 pounds it could be a good video editing laptop... Not shipping yet though

Simon

Simon,

thanks and I will research this one...let you know what i find.

shawn

So I just had a rude awakening trying to edit HDV on my laptop.

Last year I needed a new laptop. I was mainly shooting stills at the time and being a PC guy (mainly) I bought what I thought was a good machine.

3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 processor

1 Gig RAM

7200 RPM Hard Drive

1400 x 1050 hi-res screen

all the bells and whistles...

Sounds good so far. I must say that I was happy with it for stills. Photoshop ran well, as did all other aps I used. I thought it was going to have the stuff to handle video too. Nope.

I loaded a trial version of Adobe Premier and tested it out with some SD video. Seemed to work OK but when I tried to edit HDV it could not handle it. Why?

I bet some of you know. Wish I did.

I have a whimpy graphics card. At the time I didn't think much about it but ultimately it is what doomed my machine. It has 32mb of memory. Not even close to good enough. The sad part is that I can't upgrade it past 64mb even if I wanted to. Bummer. Time to get a new laptop.

So, what kind of video card do I need? Laptops seem to offer cards up to 256mb so that seems like the way to go. Is 128mb good enough? And is there more to a video card than just it's size? What does one shop for when choosing a card? I didn't know then and I don't know now.

I think I'm going to return to my Apple roots and get a Powerbook G4 (for various reasons). Apple offers an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card with 128 MB DDR memory. Not sure if it is upgradeable, or if I need to.

I've still got more to learn...

DanB

Dan

Wait for Macworld to be done... I suspect there'll be some new announcements to be made there concerning intel laptops.

Wait for Macworld to be done...

Are you going to be there? I am scheduled for Wed thru Friday.

Nope will be u/w on the opposite end of the world hopefully.