Hi all,

I've recently bought a firewire camcorder, a firewire capture card, etc. I am a graphic designer with lots of experience on different fields, including 3D and even proffessional TV production. I know most of the software available out there, both the freeware and the professional. In fact, I just wrote a book on a freeware Lego CAD system which can be used for easy and cool 3D CGI (Ldraw).

Currently, I do some low key video stuff. This is a hobby and I do not want to spend too much money on it (in fact, the whole point is to use cheap solutions to write about them). However, my movies are a complex mixture of life footage with lots of CGI and whatnot. I use the freeware editor Zwei Stein. I think I understand pretty well formats, compression codecs and the whole lot.

Alas, I have a very specific issue. I use all this setup hooked to an ok laptop (Toshiba Tecra). The problem is that once the final video is finalized in the editor (i.e. Premiere or Zwei Stein), it takes quite a while for the computer to render the actual final file (i.e. 10 minutes for 90 second of audio/video). What I would like to do is decrease that time, even if it decreases the quality. Most of my video is meant to be watched on computer screens anyway. And I can always render the final copy with software - but I'd like to do quick and dirty tryouts throughout the editing process.

What are the (low cost) hardware realtime encoding solutions for laptops? Products like ADS technologies USB Instant DVD have a hardware encoder, but does it kick in at this time? Or to put it another way, will it grab a video file from the harddrive and re-encode it in real time into another file in the same hard drive? If not, what else could I look into?

Yes, I'll end up getting a nice desktop system. Then again, I can take the laptop and camera with me everywhere ...