Laptop or dedicated card in a PC?

1. noussummon
   Member

   
   Hi all, I've had the misfortune of my PC breaking down. I'm a novice and had the opportunity of owning a Canopus Dvstorm2 card that I got 5 years ago. It worked well with my MiniDv camcorder. However finding a compatible latest motherboard & graphics card to work with it now is proving difficult. I would like to upgrade to the newer Intel dual core processors. I had a great Pentium 4 3ghz system that took me to a finished dvd that looked great on the telly although 'patched' on the LCD monitor. My primary question is with this Canopus card I could have done some realtime stuff as long as I used the native Canopus codec and the hardware helped it along. My mind is telling me things must have moved on since 5 years ago and laptops are more powerful now to handle editing, but i'm not to sure what the quality is like from these software products and their encoders. I trusted my setup. All I did was edit other peoples recordings as well as my own. Is a laptop any use to edit video. What problems would I encounter later on if I did purchase one?

   Posted 5 years ago #

2. hidef1080
   Member

   
   I’m a user of laptops but I don’t know anything about Canopus Dvstorm2.
   
   I would feel very save in saying that laptops of today are far better than any desktop of years ago.
   
   I have had great success with two Sony VAIO’s – one is two years old and one I got in January. VAIO #1 can handle SD video with no problem but HDV is hard.
   VAIO #2 can deal with HDV with no trouble at all. Both run XP Media Center.
   
   I need laptops because of the need to move and edit on the spot and many times I will record right to my hard drive and skip the MiniDV tape..
   
   Problem:
   Laptops are not cheap and you cannot really upgrade like you could with a desktop.
   
   Desktop will give you far more everything for your money than any laptop. No question.
   
   For me and what I do, laptops are the best thing but desktops do it faster and cheaper.
   
   But I’m still a laptop guy!

   Posted 5 years ago #

3. jcschild
   Member

   
   HI,
   a dedicated card really isnt needed for most people.
   get a canopus ADVC 110 or 300.
   then you can capture analog or DV/HDV via any system with a firewire port.
   
   as far as lappy vs desktop, hidef pretty much gave a good answer.
   more for less on a desktop with upgrade ability.
   also laptops can be pretty limiting if its your main system. you will need to have ext drives and most laptops have crappy graphics cards.
   
   there are some 17/19" laptops with 2 internal drives and up to Quadro video cards, but they aint cheap.
   
   Scott
   ADK

   Posted 5 years ago #

4. noussummon
   Member

   
   Thanks for the swift replies. I will look into that Canopus product. Without any capture device, will I still be able to have control of my MiniDV camera via any software when loading the recording onto my HDD? and is realtime preview possible without rendering when adding transition, video effects etc in these software. Most of my work is standard digital but I would like to have HDV capabilities in my next setup. As a system benchmark can anyone tell me what kind of time elapse they achieve to encode avi into another format like mpeg etc. It would be useful to know what I need for my next setup. In my last setup I captured Analogue/DV in realtime but encoding frame by frame was time consuming after editing before even starting any dvd authoring. The burning is the easiest!

   Posted 5 years ago #

5. jcschild
   Member

   
   HI,
   
   alot of the preview of effects has to do with the software, and what effects. basic transitional effects should be real time preview.
   a sepia effect could take awhile.
   Adobe used to require a hardware card like Matrox inorder to do any decent preview in real time. now computers are so fast and adobe is better coded that most previews can be viewed real time.
   
   Vegas seems to allow most again, Edius is funky with some of the codecs so again depends, Avid..well thats another story but most simple effects can be previewed real time.
   one of the things i liked about Liquid most was its abilty to preview real time and allowing both the GPU (video card) and CPU to render whilst previewing.
   
   the faster the system the better ability for real time preview. (cpu, video card is important here)
   the faster the system the faster the renders. CPU and HDDs are more important for this, however some software gets help from the GPU on render.
   
   basically an Intel core 2 duo or quad will do faster than real time renders (depends on effects used)
   where an Dual Quad Xeon could render in 1/4 or less of real time. (assuming standard effects nothing crazy)
   a core duo laptop will be less but could come close to the core 2 duo desktop if you have Esata external drives and a good graphics card.
   generally 10-20% slower than same speed desktop.
   
   Scott
   ADK

   Posted 5 years ago #

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