I'm thinking about getting Avid Xpress DV and was hoping for some advice about what sort of laptop I need to run it well. I appreciate that I need 256 MBRAM and a firewire port but... Do I have to have a PIII processor or will any processor over 750 Mhz run it? If I choose to have a small hard drive of say 20 gig - how easy is it for me to plug in more storage? and is it expensive? - and what does the RPM figure mean - does it matter? Many thanks, Jonah

-- Jonah Fisher (Jonah_Fisher1@hotmail.com), March 16, 2002

Answers

Hi Jonah,

I have a IBM Thinkpad T21, PIII 800MHz, 512MB 100MHz RAM and an external Lacie 60GB FireWire drive (5400 RPM, I believe).

I've shot, edited and won an award for a 12 minutes film on this system using Premiere 6. I've now moved to Avid Express 3.5.3. Now, my latop is being used for other things apart from editing and while this has worked fine for Premiere, it doesn't look like a good setup for Avid.

I would put together a separate system just to handle the video editing i.e. nothing else on the system apart from DV softare. Go for the fastest processor you can. Throw in at least 384MB of RAM, 512MB is better (use 266MHz DDR-SDRAM). Keep you OS and Avid Xpress on one drive and put the Audio/Video on a 7200 RPM drive(s) - if you can afford to, get seprate drives for Audio and Video!

Try to partition the drive and put your Audio and Video on separate partitions. I haven't tried this with the Pocket Drive but I have, as an experiment, put Audio and Video on separate drives in order to avoide buffer underrun errors - a message that XDV gives if it can't read the data fast enough. What I will try is to partition the 60GB drive into partitions and put Audio and Video into separate partitions to see if that works. My gut feeling is that you need at least a 7200 RPM drive if you want to put the Audio and Video on the same drive.

I hope it helps!

Regards

-- Mohammed Tahir (motah33@hotmail.com), January 07, 2003.