Editing with Premiere on a Laptop

[Vince Becquiot]

It depends on what you are trying to edit. If you want to do it the right way, you really won’t be that mobile. You’ll probably need a machine with 2 drives (Forget battery life), and an external SATA RAID for fast access on long projects, and/or back up.

Laptop displays are also the biggest offenders on calibration. It will work if you are on the road, but in most cases you’ll need at least an external monitor at some point in your final edit.

Most current laptops will handle SD very well, not HD, or at least not without constant rendering.

Vince

[Philip Merten]

I just installed Premiere Pro CS3 on my laptop that runs Vista and it works perfectly; although I plan to limit its use for news and when I need to edit in the field for whatever reason.

[Mike Cohen]

I run 2.0 on a XP Pro Core 2 Duo Dell with 2 gigs ram and internal 7200rpm 120 gig drive, and external USB SATA drive.

[Warren Morningstar]

I’m running CS2 on a ThinkPad T42 (1.60 GHZ Pentium M – single core) with a 2nd hard drive in the megamedia bay and 3 gigs of RAM. Works just fine with SD (DV) video. I’ve cut a lot of things in the field. It will handled HDV (mpeg) timelines if they are simple and you have patience. Tends to choke if you try to use Cineform Aspect intermediate codec.

[Tim Kolb]

[Warren Morningstar] “I’ve cut a lot of things in the field. It will handled HDV (mpeg) timelines if they are simple and you have patience. Tends to choke if you try to use Cineform Aspect intermediate codec.”

That’s interesting…typically it should be the other way around. A much weaker processor will push CineForm around than HDV…HDV’s MPEG chores are much more processor-intense than CineForm.

I edit CineForm HD fairly regularly, including 2K on a Dell M90 (not a small machine by any means), but I’ve edited CineForm Aspect 1080 stuff on a single core 2.8 GHz laptop with an external FireWire drive…2 streams with effects…no problem. That machine could not handle HDV native under any circumstances…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

CPO, Digieffects

[Dan Asselin]

I edit for all kinds of clients on Premiere Pro on my laptop. Now most of what I am working with is DV but I find that it is not really necessary to have an extremely quick laptop either. That’s becaue I edit with the client but RENDER back at the office using an external drive. If you don’t have to deliver a finished product right away this works like a charm and really impresses clients.

[Warren Morningstar]

It may be that my second hard drive doesn’t spit out data fast enough for Cineform. Or there may be some other variable in there. I haven’t tried very hard to figure out why because it’s not critical to what I do. If I have to edit on the laptop, it’s usually for something that needs to be posted to the Web quickly. So I downconvert the video in the camera and bring it in as DV. And my laptop, which is now getting a bit long in the tooth, handles that just fine.