How best to expand laptop for video work?

[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.

 

[Jacques Ciana]

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.

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

 

[Guest]

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....

 

[Tony Lewis]

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.

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.

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

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.

 

[Tony Lewis]

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.....

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