adeyadey's Journal: Building a portable video edit suite..

Heres a question for you..

I would like to build a reasonably priced portable video edit suite, perhaps using components from my existing desktop. The current system has a DVD-R, 80 Gb HD, Firewire card, Adobe Premiere. I want to be able to multiboot Win98se, Win2000NT, Linux. The options I can see are:

1) Rebuild my exisiting desktop system into a micro-atx case, with its existing DVD-R & 80 Gb hd, buy a new LCD, lightest I can find. Not true portable, luggable in a suitcase. (Weight??)

2) Buy cheap toshiba (550 UK pounds) and take DVD-R/80Gb HD & build/buy a external box for them, connect via USB-2 or Firewire. (Can then be used with both desktop or laptop)

3) Buy portable to do the lot (1200 UK pounds) including DVD-R, 60 Gb hd, Firewire i/f etc.

Anyone got any thoughts/experience on those options? If I went for option 2, anyone got experience of hooking desktop drives to a laptop in that way? Is it best to use Firewire or USB2? Remember this is video editing..

Or option 1 - What is the smallest/lightest case I can get? I'd rather avoid option 3 - laptops with DVD-Rs are very pricey at the moment.

On a related topic - I have loads of 1 hour films on Mini-DV (good quality - shot with 3ccd cam, etc) I would like to backup onto DVD at very high quality - 1 hour per DVD. Is that good enough not to show visible artifacts if the material is converted back to DV-AVI and reedited later? What is the best MPEG-2 encoder? Or, if it doesnt need to play on a standard stand-alone DV player, should I look at MPEG-4 at 1-hour per DVD?

Thoughts anyone?

#2

[silas_moeckel]

OK I have a bit ofexperience working with portable editing rigs. For your solution number 2 firewire is the way to go USB has to much CPU overhead. The boxes are cheap enough though you will generaly need to plug them into a wall outlet.

Your big ugly issue will be the LCD monitors they are horid if your tring to anything more than cuts only editing. There color is generaly off and definatly not up to snuff for doing any real color correction in post. Think about a gold old lunch box PC case it will hav

Apple

[tliet]

Check out the PowerBook G4 from Apple. It's all about video with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, or for starters with the free iMovie and iDVD solutions.

Don't take it from me, check it out yourself, you'll love it.

Check out 2-pop.com for more DV stuff.

some ideas

[MalachiConstant]

First of all, I edit on a Mac with FCP, so you know what I would suggest. I'll just skip that.

I'd definately go with firewire. If you ever need to capture any DV it's the only choice.

As for putting your DV footage onto a DVD, why not just save the tapes? Put whatever you want to watch on DVDs and save the tapes for later editing. I've never put DV footage on a DVD then recaptured it, but my guess is that there will be artifacts with that much transcoding going on.

Like the poster above says, LCDs s

Digitally transfer D8

[Bitmanhome]

Mini-DV camcorders can send the raw digital data thru Firewire. I dunno if D8 can do that, but if you want to get rid of the tapes, that would be the way to do it. You could then burn the footage to DVDs in data mode (as computer files, not DVD movies). It'll probably take several DVDs to back up each tape, but you won't lose any quality.

I know it loses out on geek points, but...

[anomaly]

I recently made the call to do my video editing on a Powerbook.

Powerbooks are *not* cheap, but after futzing with firewire under Mandrake Linux (and getting keno, cinelerra, and a host of other utilities and dependencies) I decided that life is too short to invest a ton of time in something that has already been baked.

The Powerbook makes a great portable rig - it's got a wonderful video display, good battery life, small form factor, integrated wireless networking, built in Firewire, USB, Gb Ethernet, util