Capturing Video on a laptap

[jebaker42]

I have been been looking for a laptop that I could capture and edit video on. Seems like all the drives are either 4200 or 5400. Can I expect to get a decent capture with one of the lower speed drives?

If not, I could get an external USB 2.0 drive to capture to. The laptops I have been looking at have firewire drives for the input. Will this senerio work?

Any thoughts, any suggestions, any concerns would be appreciated before I waste money on something that will not work in the end.

[redwudz]

Generally the limitation on laptops has been the size of the hard drives, though newer laptops have a little more room.

I use an external capture box, a ADVC-100, with my laptop occasionally, and it works great. I also have an external 80G Firewire/USB 2.0 hard drive.

With either a USB or Firewire external capture device the speed of the drive is not really an issue, just the space available. For editing and capturing, two drives are really the way to go.

[rennervision]

If I have a laptop with dual hard drives inside, can the one containing my OS be 5400 rpm and the one used for capture be 7200 rpm? Or should both hard drives be 7200 rpm?

[redwudz]

Having a separate capture drive will help a lot. A faster drive is better for capturing. For the OS, not that important, IMO. It would mostly affect the speed of loading programs or files.

My laptop has 4200RPM single hard drive. I wouldn't try to capture MPEG at full DVD resolution. But transfering DV from a ADVC-100 works fine, with no dropped frames or sync problems. Using an external capture device, Firewire in either DV format or USB 2.0 hardware converted MPEG-2 would be the way I would go for a laptop.