— Laptop advice —

[Vince Becquiot]

Love the laptop questions 🙂

I cannot recommend ANY HP laptops for the terrible troubles we’ve had in the past as explained in a previous post. It doesn’t matter how much you pay, ours were over $3000 a piece. To be fair, if you are under warranty, their support will be good, and you’ll likely need it. Just make sure you buy several years of extended warranty.

The Toshiba is a great machine, the specs are definitely going to handle some heavy editing, and it has 2 drives which is a great feature; Just realize that your battery likely won’t go over an hour while editing, and as with most laptops, you’ll likely have to invest into a SATA card and external drive or array if you need to edit HD on a regular basis.

I’d also recommend taking a look at the Macbook Pros i7, that’s what we settled on, and though the specs may not be as impressive as the Toshiba, you get the added advantage of dual OS options / Final Cut, and top notch service in Apple stores, something you may need for a machine you rely on when traveling. These are screaming with Premiere in OSX mode.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Carlos]

Thanks Vince,

I’m aware of the short duration of batteries with 2 HD, but I think I will not use the PC like that for to long.

I’m going to Canada for 6 months to a year, and need to travel a bit.
With a laptop I will take my company with me, if you know what I mean.

Most of the time I will work connected to AC.

I have 2 major concerns for this machine:

1- the size of the screen
I’ve tested some 15″ and 16″ with 1920×1080 and it’s a bit painful to me. To short letters.
So I prefer to go for a 18″

2- CS5 takes advantage of NVIDIA Cuda power.
Will these laptops really help CS5, or just the GPU on the desktop boards? – Mercury

If CS5 does not take DIRECT profit from the GPU on the laptops, maybe one with less power or even a i5 processor, will do the job.
I’m NOT a ritch guy…

For the same amount of money I can buy a quite good desktop PC.
But moving around from one city to the other with a desktop it’s not a good idea. I think.

That’s the reason for the laptop option.

Let me know your opinion.

Sincerely
Carlos

[Vince Becquiot]

At this time, no laptop that I know of has a card that supports Mercury Playback natively, but of course, the better the card, the better the performance. If you were to build your own desktop computer, or have someone do it for you, I’d say mount inside a spring loaded rack mount case that can handle travel and vibration. But that can get heavy.

[Eric Addison]

I couldn’t access your links for some reason, but I’ve got a dv8 HP laptop and it’s been great for me. Unlike Vince, I’m a big HP supporter – all my machines are HP and they have all served me well.

I cut HD on my laptop in CS5 with no problems, and having 2 internal hard drives is an essential – got to have it.

Hope that helps!

—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com

[Carlos]

Thank you Eric,

Sorry for the links.
The TOSHIBA seems to be working for me.

The HP is a dv8-1050ep (VL126EA). Please Google it.

Since you work with CS5 on a laptop, maybe you can help me on some questions.

– I feel that less than 18″ is to small for editing with small menu letters on Premiere. What do you say?

– I plan to get an USB 3 express card and connect 2 external usb3 HD for video. Is this to much or a good move?

– What GPU do you have? Do you recommend the best possible, or after a certain level, I will not get any more from the system?

Any input is welcome.
Thank’s a lot,

Carlos

[Eric Addison]

As for the screen – I love having the larger screen. As I really am only editing HD now, it’s nice having a 1920×1080 screen. It’s a beast to lug around, but it’s worth it.

In regards to your question about the USB 3.0 card, sounds good to me. That being said, I’ve done some edits with a small USB 2.0 connected drive that’s worked fine. And the dv8 I got has an eSATA port – that may be the best way to go if you can. But with an extra internal hard drive, you should be able to edit just fine…so long as you’re not trying to cut 4K Red footage at 4K resoultion.

The video card that came with my laptop was the NVIDIA 230M…it’s a great card, but it’s not on the supported list. I’ve used the “hack” to enable it and it’s worked pretty well. I’d say get the best card you can afford.

—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com

[Eric Jurgenson]

Check out the Acer 8940G or the 8943. Top performing i7 quad machines at a very nice price ($1,350. for the 8940G). I’ve had the 8940G since the first of the year, and it is kicking some serious butt with CS5. The 8940G has a hackable Nvidia GTS-250M graphics card; the newer 8943 has an ATI HD 5850 card. Both laptops have dual hard drive capability, full HD screens, and a Blu-Ray player/DVD burner.

[Carlos]

Eric Addison,

Can you tell me more on “the hack”.
I’ve read something on writing the name of the board on a file(???)

——————————————-

Eric Jurgenson,
I’m aware of the Acer’s but here the support is terrible here and “no one” on the industry moves in the Acer direction.

About the ATI, doesen’t CS5 work better with NVIDIA than with ATI?

Carlos

[Eric Addison]

There is a way to “hack” PPro and use other CUDA enabled cards. Realize up front that doing so may give you great results, but it also may NOT give you great results…you do this at your own risk.

Give this thread a read – https://forums.adobe.com/thread/632143?tstart=0 – it should tell you how to do the hack.

I’ve run the hack on my laptop with the GeForce 230M card, and it gave me okay results but PPro seemed to become a little more unstable. I’ve since turned it off, and edit without it.

—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com

[Eric Jurgenson]

Whatever. You might want to look at the Macbook Pro. It’s half the computer at twice the price.

Both Nvidia and AMD will work with CS5. Some Nvidia cards will support the Mercury Playback Engine, a hardware-based accelerator built into CS5.