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Laptop opinions for video-editing please

P

poachedeggs

Flightless Bird
I'm posting this on behalf of my friend, who is about to buy a
laptop. She has a DV camera that's from back when they cost a bit,
and a new Flip HD. She still very satisfactorily uses the DV camera
with her 2004 Mac, which is a 1 ghz machine, possibly 1.3, with 1 gb
of RAM. Her pc is older still, a 1 ghz machine with 512 mb of RAM.
Obviously these are long in the tooth now, and we've been looking at a
Packard Bell for £549 which has:

4gb of RAM
a core 2 duo 2.1 ghz processor
320 gb hard drive (haven't checked it's the seemingly recommended
7200rpm but I think so)

it has a nVidia deidicated graphics chip with 512 mb
It's 64 bit with 64 bit Windows on it (that may have sounded a bit
naive, but I am!)

I've played one of her Flip films, which is barely 45 seconds long, on
my two year old Toshiba - 1.6 ghz dual core, 2 gb RAM, having tried
Windows 7 and its native Vista - and though it plays beautifully in
Windows Media Player, it is slightly jumpy in Windows Movie Maker.
I've also tried Sony Vegas 9. Windows 7 gave better results - for
example with Vista I was only getting sound in Windows Movie Maker
with just a black video area - but it's still not ideal.

My desktop PC has a faster processor, a 3ghz dual core AMD, a 7200rpm
hard drive and 1 gb of RAM for the moment, with similar results using
Vegas. Both my machines do fine with non HD material. I'm assuming
the Flip doesn't have a setting for lower quality video, or that my
friend would rather not use that if so.

Will the Packard Bell eliminate the shortfall in smoothness?

My friend seems decided on not getting anewer Mac, partly price-wise,
and this Packard Bell seems quite astounding value feature-wise and is
easy to find in Currys and PC World.

I've watched the Performance section of Task Manager, and on this
Packard Bell using Media player 1.1 gb of RAM was used and very low
cpu, about 10 or 15 %, against maybe 30% on my Toshiba - all using the
same Flip HD video.

Are there other factors? I have read right about this dedicated video
and that will help? I was surprised to see only 600mb of RAM and 30%
of cpu used watching this video on my laptop and still to see the
stuttery look, but maybe that's just my onbaord graphics. It doesn't
concern me for myself as video is not my thing, but I just did a bit
of tinkering to help my friend.

What do you think?

Thanks for all replies. She may buy tomorrow, so... when you're
ready...
 
N

Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]

Flightless Bird
On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 13:58:08 -0800 (PST), poachedeggs
<poachedeggs@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

>I'm posting this on behalf of my friend, who is about to buy a
>laptop. She has a DV camera that's from back when they cost a bit,
>and a new Flip HD. She still very satisfactorily uses the DV camera
>with her 2004 Mac, which is a 1 ghz machine, possibly 1.3, with 1 gb
>of RAM. Her pc is older still, a 1 ghz machine with 512 mb of RAM.
>Obviously these are long in the tooth now, and we've been looking at a
>Packard Bell for £549 which has:
>
>4gb of RAM
>a core 2 duo 2.1 ghz processor
>320 gb hard drive (haven't checked it's the seemingly recommended
>7200rpm but I think so)
>
>it has a nVidia deidicated graphics chip with 512 mb
>It's 64 bit with 64 bit Windows on it (that may have sounded a bit
>naive, but I am!)



So according to the Currys page, it's using this NVidia mobile core :
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-G-210M.17638.0.html


>I've played one of her Flip films, which is barely 45 seconds long, on
>my two year old Toshiba - 1.6 ghz dual core, 2 gb RAM, having tried
>Windows 7 and its native Vista - and though it plays beautifully in
>Windows Media Player, it is slightly jumpy in Windows Movie Maker.



WMM is almosy always jumpy IME for playback, so I wouldn't consider
that as much of a yardstick... it's also quite old now (I think 2003
?) so more modern video editnig software could be expected to perform
better on playback and rendering.


>I've also tried Sony Vegas 9. Windows 7 gave better results - for
>example with Vista I was only getting sound in Windows Movie Maker
>with just a black video area - but it's still not ideal.
>My desktop PC has a faster processor, a 3ghz dual core AMD, a 7200rpm
>hard drive and 1 gb of RAM for the moment, with similar results using
>Vegas. Both my machines do fine with non HD material. I'm assuming
>the Flip doesn't have a setting for lower quality video, or that my
>friend would rather not use that if so.



The product page for those indicates between 4-9Mbps video rate in
H264 format assuming it's these cameras :
http://www.theflip.com/en-us/Products/specs.aspx


>Are there other factors? I have read right about this dedicated video
>and that will help? I was surprised to see only 600mb of RAM and 30%
>of cpu used watching this video on my laptop and still to see the
>stuttery look, but maybe that's just my onbaord graphics. It doesn't
>concern me for myself as video is not my thing, but I just did a bit
>of tinkering to help my friend.


RAM usage isn't normally a concern when decoding video. It's the CPU
spikes, but in modern PCs these can actually be quite low unless
you're actively running other software (for example playback *and*
video re-encoding at the same time)

The GPU in the graphics system now offloads most of that work, and
modern GPUs not only do most of the video decoding in hardware - H264
as in the NVidia mobile GPU above - they can *also* assist in encoding
or re-encoding video at rates at or above real-time, even full
1080p/25fps can now be achieved on new PCs.

That depends greatly on the software having *support* for GPU encoding
- a couple of years ago ATI released Avivo transcoder software for
their GPUs http://ati.amd.com/technology/avivo/technology.html and
NVidia have a very similar system for use by software developers.

So what she'd need to look for on the software side is to ensure the
video editing software has hardware assistance, which avoids lengthy
encodes which tie up the CPU (or rather, frees it up for general tasks
like cheking facebook while she's waiting...)

HTH
Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2010
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs
 
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