Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

PC LAPTOP for data management

Peter Osinski

Peter Osinski

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 5, 2009
Messages
370
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Location
New York
Hey guys,

I do a lot of run and gun style shooting where I need a light, portable setup. Offloading to a laptop is going to be a must for me but I am running into a problem picking the appropriate setup.

1. Macbook Pro 17" w/ esata express card adapter and applecare plan $3000
This setup will include my Adobe CS4 Production Premium

2. PC Laptop w/ built in Esata port, HDMI, and VGA $750

The macbook pro allows me to use Premiere Pro to preview my files using a RED project with a very low working resolution, but it costs about 5 times more than the PC option, and I have no choice but to buy the biggest heaviest model.

The PC laptop has more built in ports that I need, the difference in price would allow me to buy an additional 128GB SSD, and the laptop itself is smaller and lighter.

The downside is I do not know of any easy way to playback or preview the footage on PC. Would Redcine at a low resolution work? Is there a way to playback the quicktime proxies without FCP?

I would appreciate any comments suggestions or opinions
 
You'd ideally want TWO Esata ports to allow backups to two external hard drives at once, or at least an Express 34 expansion port to allow additional ports.

Red Drives are Firewire 800, so you need at least one Firewire 800 port. If you use the expansion port to get one or two extra Esata ports, you can't use the expansion port to get Firewire 800, and vice versa. So your PC laptop needs to have Firewire 800 built in.

You might be able to get away with Firewire 400 for small projects, but it will definitely be the bottleneck in data management. USB2 is way too slow for Red data management.

You can playback Red footage in Redcine-X, or Premiere Pro at lower resolutions, and almost certainly Quicktime Player for Windows on a PC or Mac.

A large, bright, high resolution screen is very useful screen estate.

I'm sure there are PC laptops out there that could work as well, but not currently personally aware of any - I'm a couple of years out of date on current PC offerings.

Your price breakdown doesn't include extended warranty (and most won't be as comprehensive as Applecare) and Adobe CS4/5 production premium for the PC to match the Mac, so the price comparison is a little unfair.

BTW I'm not a Mac fanboy, but the 17" MacBook Pro seems to be the industry standard Red data management workhorse - and that's probably for a good reason.
 
Peter Osinski said:
Hey guys,
The downside is I do not know of any easy way to playback or preview the footage on PC. Would Redcine at a low resolution work? Is there a way to playback the quicktime proxies without FCP?

I would appreciate any comments suggestions or opinions
Click to expand...

You mentioned PPro... Thats what I use for realtime R3D playback in Windows, it recognizes R3D struction natively and plays R3D files out of its file browser and can change debayer quality on the fly. Skips quicktime altogether.

ericyoung said:
BTW I'm not a Mac fanboy, but the 17" MacBook Pro seems to be the industry standard Red data management workhorse - and that's probably for a good reason.
Click to expand...

"Its probably good for a reason?" That doesnt explain much. Maybe it is not for a good reason?
 
Noah Yuan-Vogel said:
You mentioned PPro... Thats what I use for realtime R3D playback in Windows, it recognizes R3D struction natively and plays R3D files out of its file browser and can change debayer quality on the fly. Skips quicktime altogether.



"Its probably good for a reason?" That doesnt explain much. Maybe it is not for a good reason?
Click to expand...

No - it's for several good reasons:

1) A 17" MBP is not as expensive as indicated, especially if you buy a last-gen one from a reseller, as many do. I bought mine for £1200, around $1900.

2) They are well built and last well. They can be easily warranteed for their lifetime.

3) OS X is more stable and much less prone to viruses than Windows - although I accept the former is less of an issue than it used to be, the latter is especially important in a data enviroment.

4) MBPs already have all the ports needed for this work - as indicated by Eric.

5) Whilst you cannot run OSX on a PC, you can run windows on a Mac, allowing support for any software needed on set.

6) The screens are of more consistent and higher standard than any $750 laptop I've ever seen.

7) In performance tests, the MBPs regularly come out at or near the top for Windows apps.

However, I suspect all of these are over-ridden by the fact that if you are doing professional work on set, the cost of the laptop is so small relative to the cost of problems, that most think the extra is worthwhile, however small you feel the advantages listed above are.

I would use PC or Macs as workstations. For a laptop, I want the best built, best performing machine - and as many PC magazine reviews have confirmed, that's a Mac.
 
I concur. Built well. Warranty. Customer service is excellent. Payment plan too.

I bought the 2010 17" and it rents out with me like any other piece of gear. It paid itself off in short order. So if you plan to use it on set, it's too precious to just "throw it in". With a Mobile Red Rocket, it'll earn its keep.
 
Ben makes many valid arguments.

In general, because the software is as important as the hardware, and there are more software options for RED on Mac today, and the fact that the MacBook Pro does a fine job of running Windows... A MacBook Pro is a pretty good answer. It's my main mobile platform.

It all really depends on what you plan on using it for.

If it is mostly back up and data management, a PC's can be a better option, particularly when it comes to hardware.

The core issue is that IO can be a problem on the MacBook Pro's.

All the big guys, HP's EliteBook Series, Dell's M6500 series etc. have options I really want on my next Mac, and they have them today.

USB 3.0 is becoming pretty easy to find these days, as are external esata ports. The higher end PC's have quadro level graphics with lots of cuda cores, and some of the Dell's even have a second slide out screen. Faster processors and more memory are also available on the PC side.

This level of laptop also has 'dreamcolor' or equivalent wide gamut calibratable screens.

Pretty slick stuff and things like the ultrascope become an option too.

Having said that a mobile workstation at this level is going to cost you more than a MacBook Pro, and if you are looking to do more of the one light grading thing, there are arguable better options today (or coming) on the Mac platform on the software side.


I think Storm is going to be the killer app in this space, so I'm just hoping that IO get's solved in the next MacBook Pro.

You get to decide.

Steve
 
HP laptops are good, I have one and use it every day to edit, finish, offload, watch porn, pick takes, check email, color correct, pirate film, encode media.

all in one. love it. would not change for the world. CS5 is loaded and works well on it.
 
Have to agree with Stephen on USB3 - although as of yet not all the pieces of the puzzle (storage, IO etc) are really there for it yet. Next generation of everything will make this a must.
 
Last week I ordered a Dell XPS 15. I upgraded the CPU, OS drive, RAM and display and it came in around $2000CDN (price includes MS Office2010). For a few bucks more you can add next-business-day-onsite-support that does work great. I had a videocard give up it's ghost and had a tech onsite the next day to swap it out.

Dell XPS 15
Win 7/64 premium
i7-740QM CPU
8Gb DDR3 RAM
nVidia Geforce GT 435M 2GB
256Gb SSD
2x USB 3.0
1x eSATA
Expresscard 34
Bluetooth 3.0
1920x1080 display
HDMI

That pretty much covers all the highspeed IO's out there for now and the Expresscard slot will give me the option of adding more eSATA ports, CF reader, Firewire800 if I need. After looking around it seems like the best swiss army knife machine available today.
 
Paul Steinberg said:
Last week I ordered a Dell XPS 15. I upgraded the CPU, OS drive, RAM and display and it came in around $2000CDN (price includes MS Office2010). For a few bucks more you can add next-business-day-onsite-support that does work great. I had a videocard give up it's ghost and had a tech onsite the next day to swap it out.

Dell XPS 15
Win 7/64 premium
i7-740QM CPU
8Gb DDR3 RAM
nVidia Geforce GT 435M 2GB
256Gb SSD
2x USB 3.0
1x eSATA
Expresscard 34
Bluetooth 3.0
1920x1080 display
HDMI

That pretty much covers all the highspeed IO's out there for now and the Expresscard slot will give me the option of adding more eSATA ports, CF reader, Firewire800 if I need. After looking around it seems like the best swiss army knife machine available today.
Click to expand...
Do you edit and grade 4K with it?
 
Well that machine isn't here yet and I'm not a 'real' editor, I just hack around but I have used my workstation with slightly better spec's to cut R3D files with CS5 and it's as smooth as butter. This laptop is really just for data management (thread title) but if I can get the CS5 hack to work with the mobile nVidia card (to enable the Mercury Playback Engine) I'd imagine I could cut with it as well if needed.
 
Paul Steinberg said:
Well that machine isn't here yet and I'm not a 'real' editor, I just hack around but I have used my workstation with slightly better spec's to cut R3D files with CS5 and it's as smooth as butter. This laptop is really just for data management (thread title) but if I can get the CS5 hack to work with the mobile nVidia card (to enable the Mercury Playback Engine) I'd imagine I could cut with it as well if needed.
Click to expand...
What's this hack? It is hard to get?
________
CONCEPT X6 ACTIVEHYBRID
 
Paul Steinberg said:
Well that machine isn't here yet and I'm not a 'real' editor, I just hack around but I have used my workstation with slightly better spec's to cut R3D files with CS5 and it's as smooth as butter. This laptop is really just for data management (thread title) but if I can get the CS5 hack to work with the mobile nVidia card (to enable the Mercury Playback Engine) I'd imagine I could cut with it as well if needed.
Click to expand...
4K?
 
:jacked:

The "Cuda Hack" is very simple, you just add a line in a text file to enable Mercury Playback Engine support on nVidia Cuda cards that aren't officially supported yet. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/629557

I can cut 4K/2K R3D files just fine with Premiere CS5 on my workstation. You can mix and match resolutions, Premiere doesn't seem to care (keep in mind I'm not cutting off a single drive though). Just drag n' drop 'em into a bin and cut away. I'm a DP, not an editor so I'm mostly bringing files into Premiere to just play around with or do some personal work. If I have 4K files on my hands I set the playback resolution to 1/8 in my editing space and 1/4 in the colour correction space.

This is my workstation, as you can see the spec's are similar to that laptop.
Win/7-64
i7-960 8-core, 3.2Ghz
12Gb DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX 480
Soundblaster X-fi
256Gb SSD (OS)
5Tb RAID-0 (internal, media) SATAIII
1Tb (internal, scratch/projects) SATAIII
Dual displays

Pretty basic stuff but it runs CS5 suite just fine. Everything in realtime. I'm just using the motherboards RAID controller but I understand there is a significant performance bump if you drop another $500-ish on a dedicated RAID controller card. Purchased last summer for about $3K so I'm sure you get more for less now.


After reading the spiderman4 thread it sounds like Epic's data load is going to be pretty heavy but I still think that XPS 15 notebook can handle the load typical from commercials, not features.
 
Nicole B said:
Is it strictly necessary for editing/color correcting/grading stuff?

Or can a laptop like this one work it out?

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...ategory=notebooks&series_name=ENVY173D_series
Click to expand...
The one thing I see that may hinder playback and transcoding is ATI Radeon graphics. At present, you get better performance with CUDA enabled Nvidia graphics. Not saying you couldn't edit in this configuration... just that you could get better playback performance and render (at present... don't know what Adobe's intentions are in re: ATI's Open CL platform, for the immediate future) from the Nvidia graphics for now.

I've recently been gifted with a similar laptop and will probably use it for offloading files from the 1.8" SSD Red Station module via the eSATA port, before sending the footage on to a workstation.
 
Again, I don't work in post but from dipping my toe into edit/grading pool my belief is that if this is your primary job, a desktop workstation will give you much more flexability and productivity. A laptop like that Dell XPS15 will work as on set data mangement (as the thread was asking) but with when Epic hits, it may be max'd out (especially if you're cooking up proxies/window burns). You COULD use it for editing/grading but I could see that it could be limited.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top