recommend me a POWERFUL laptop

[bfett81]

This laptop needs to be a BEAST.

I'm gonna be capturing and editing 1080p video on this beast.

If it had a BUILT IN video capture card (via HDMI) that would be sweet.

If none of those exist, give me a secondary option. What's the hotness in USB dongles or whatever for vid cap. I need MPEG-2 streams dumped straight to my hard drive in stunning quality.

This laptop's gonna capture LIVE HD STREAMS OFF SATELLITE NETWORKS AND PROCESS THEM LIKE A M'FER!!!

Also, the bigger the screen, the better.

Price is not an obstacle.

NO MACS

[kujoe2002]

Take a look at my post in this thread:

http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?t=324576

Now if you want a laptop most of the reviews still look at the MACBOOK PRO as a SECONDARY option. I abhor MAC. I don't like the way they force you into their stuff without flexibility. With the age of video and audio editing software coming out for PC, I would say, go with a PC laptop. Here is a good site:

http://www.adkvideoediting.com/laptop.asp

I would say go with the 6core but that's back ordered for 4 months. Take the 6800 series and make sure you take the Max CPU RAM and a SSD for your OS HDD ONLY. Get the Quadro since that's the latest pro gfx for video editing. Get a storage drive of at least 4TB since HD video takes a TON of space. For the audio, go with M-Audio as they are the professional audio editing industry standard.

And per my other post, regarless of WHO you go with, (you should also know this as a video editor), You will want:

The best CPU and most RAM - for latency processing 2960XM 2.7
SSD for your primary OS - least lag. Get the 240GB SSD as you will be storing all of your data on a data drive (can be built in). For the source and render drive use the 240GB SSD for both of those as well. You can go with 120GB SSD as your OS and program files drive (but I would feel safer with 240).
An Nvidia Quadro series GFX card - industry standard on pro video editing.
tons of storage space. 4-8TB. If you are going to carry around additional external drives, then just go with the 4TB (depending on how many copies you save).

I would say go PC because the support available is either software forums or other people (like classes) who are experts in such software. However, there is more available for video editing in terms of choices for PC. Worst case scenario, go with MACBOOK PRO. In the end you should expect to pay around 7-8 grand.

[Steven P Jobs]

I said this in the other thread in General Hardware, but check whether the software you will be using benefits AT ALL from having a fast GPU (most video apps still don't). If not, just get the fastest CPU you can and 8GB RAM and the best SSD in your budget and you should be good. If it does, go with nvidia as they are way ahead for video editing right now thanks to their CUDA stuff. I don't know of any good laptops with built in capture cards so you're probably going to be stuck with an external box.

[Johnmcl7]

I said this in the other thread in General Hardware, but check whether the software you will be using benefits AT ALL from having a fast GPU (most video apps still don't). If not, just get the fastest CPU you can and 8GB RAM and the best SSD in your budget and you should be good. If it does, go with nvidia as they are way ahead for video editing right now thanks to their CUDA stuff. I don't know of any good laptops with built in capture cards so you're probably going to be stuck with an external box.

I'd agree with this as well, in fact at the moment even for applications that do support using the video card to help with encoding I prefer not to use it as I find the results are noticeably poorer although that may just be the applications I'm using. I haven't looked into capture cards for a while but I assume it's still the case that you can get those with hardware encode support which should take the pressure off the machine and ensure high quality encodes with consistent performance.

Personally I'm not a fan of using desktop processors in laptops as it tends to mean bigger, heavier and noisier machines that can be more unreliable due to the internals being so constantly hot. The mobile processors aren't as fast nor offer as many cores as the SB-E chips but you can still get a decent quad core, hyperthreaded mobile processor which should offer plenty of performance for what's required.

John