Necessities for editing on a laptop...

Agentembryo@hot

I'm making a short film in April which I had hoped to edit on my own Dell Laptop. I already have Adobe Pro on my computer so I'm set up software wise but the real question is what technical elements of my computer should I be bolstering so that I'll be able to edit together a 10 minute film without major slowdown/crashes?
Is it RAM? And if so, how can I go about buying additional ram and how much will it cost?
Cheers.

lodgepole

What is the current spec? I edit with Premiere with a relatively low amount of ram (256mb) and have never had a problem. Just make sure you have enough drive space and make sure you save often. In my experience even the most pimped out computer will crash inexplicably when you're editing video.

Freelancer

Well;

A) what are you shooting on?

how do you want to finish on?

Agentembryo@hot

Lodgepole wrote:

What is the current spec? I edit with Premiere with a relatively low amount of ram (256mb) and have never had a problem. Just make sure you have enough drive space and make sure you save often. In my experience even the most pimped out computer will crash inexplicably when you're editing video.

Yeah, I have 256mb already and plenty of drive space. Cool.
Your post cheered me up.

A) what are you shooting on?

how do you want to finish on?

Sony Z1 though I'm not using the high definition capacity.
I'll be burning it onto DVD.

smack_monkey

This might be a silly question, but do you have a way of digitising the footage onto your laptop, i.e. does it have a Firewire port? A capture card might also suffice but I've only ever used Firewire so someone else would have to confirm that.

Lump

You might get more hits over on the Audio Visual Editing board.

John

monkeyfudge

Lump wrote:

You might get more hits over on the Audio Visual Editing board.

John

I agree. Moved to AV Editing.

Lump

Having firewire would be a benefit, plenty of RAM if you can get it installed, don't know how much you can upgrade the lappy you have. Defraging your harddrive will help too, try have a seperate drive for the digitising, a firewire one, if it's not possible to have a second one, which won't be since it's a laptop!

John

monkeyfudge

I think you'll really need another stick of ram in there.

I find even Windows XP doesn't run that great on 256mb.

Get between 512mb and 1gig if you can. Ram is pretty cheap, so it shouldn't break the bank.

As Lump said, firewire is very handy. If you don't have it already on your laptop you can get PCMCIA cards that will do the job for you.

Lump

XP actually uses almost 256megs just to run!

John

lodgepole

monkeyfudge wrote:

I think you'll really need another stick of ram in there.

I find even Windows XP doesn't run that great on 256mb.

I've cut pieces that are an hour long with an XP box and 256mb RAM. More Ram would certainly speed up a few things, possibly prevent the odd crash, but the machine does the job perfectly.

I'd recomend setting up a new user within XP with no extra processes running. When I cut I have a seperate user account with literally nothing but Premiere, Photoshop and occasionally After Effects running. I disconnect the internet to remove any need for virus protection. And that's with 256mb. I can quite happily open an audio editor on top of that without much of a lag.