How best to expand laptop for video work?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony Lewis
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Tony Lewis

I want to start some basic editing (Windows Movie Maker) of videos
taken from my camcorder (firewire output) and get them onto CD or DVD.


My laptop is a Samsung running XP and has Mobile Intel Pentium III-S,
1200 MHz with 256mB RAM. I struggle to have more than 6gb free disk
space.

The laptop has two PCMCIA, two USB 1 and 1 firewire plus CD writer/DVD
play.

I'm thinking I need an external firewire hard drive, external DVD
writer but I'm worried that plugging in camcorder, hard drive and
writer together will not give me the throughput required on a single
firewire.

I could add a USB 2 PCMCIA card.

Is more RAM going to be useful? How much?

Any pointers, recommendations etc most welcome.
 
Tony Lewis said:
I want to start some basic editing (Windows Movie Maker) of videos
taken from my camcorder (firewire output) and get them onto CD or DVD.


My laptop is a Samsung running XP and has Mobile Intel Pentium III-S,
1200 MHz with 256mB RAM. I struggle to have more than 6gb free disk
space.

The laptop has two PCMCIA, two USB 1 and 1 firewire plus CD writer/DVD
play.

I'm thinking I need an external firewire hard drive, external DVD
writer but I'm worried that plugging in camcorder, hard drive and
writer together will not give me the throughput required on a single
firewire.

I could add a USB 2 PCMCIA card.

Is more RAM going to be useful? How much?

Any pointers, recommendations etc most welcome.
Click to expand...

The firewire is specially design to handle video. I have an older Sony
(850MHz. 256 RAM) with internal HDD 30GB. With the time I found the hard
drive too small so I added two external Lacie HDD (80 & 160GB) I added also
a Sony DVD +-burner. Every thing works fine without any problem even when
capturing video thru a camcorder connected to the second firewire port of
the Sony burner. I should add that I am working under win 2000 pro and NTSF
file system. Your 6 GB drive is definitively too small: one hour of AVI
video needs somewhere 15 to 20 GB of space
 
Although windows xp works best with 512Mb ram or more,256Mb is enough to start video editing
I would consider getting an external Usb 2 HDD along with your PCMCIA card
It does not really matter about the external dvd rewriter either firewire or usb 2 will do
All th Best....
 
The firewire is specially design to handle video. I have an older Sony
(850MHz. 256 RAM) with internal HDD 30GB. With the time I found the hard
drive too small so I added two external Lacie HDD (80 & 160GB) I added also
a Sony DVD +-burner. Every thing works fine without any problem even when
capturing video thru a camcorder connected to the second firewire port of
the Sony burner.
Click to expand...

Jacques, that's very encouraging. Do you simply daisy chain the
devices or are you using a hub?
I should add that I am working under win 2000 pro and NTSF
file system.
Click to expand...

NTSF doesn't improve disk performance does it?
Your 6 GB drive is definitively too small: one hour of AVI
video needs somewhere 15 to 20 GB of space
Click to expand...
It's a 30Gb but it always seems to be full, so I would hope now to get
100gb or more external like you have and stream the AVI from camcorder
to it.
 
Although windows xp works best with 512Mb ram or more,256Mb is enough to start video editing.
I would consider getting an external Usb 2 HDD along with your PCMCIA card.
It does not really matter about the external dvd rewriter either firewire or usb 2 will do.
All th Best.....
Click to expand...

Thanks for your response. Is there a reason to prefer the USB2 rather
than firewire?
 
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