On Aug 3, 2:38*am, "Panzy" wrote:
"ya woist night mayor" wrote in ...

You want to enter the arena of home video editing.
You want to use a specific Hi-Def Canon mini DV camcorder.
You want to partner it with a laptop.

First you need to discern what you are going to do with the
footage once transferred to the laptop. Once edited, will you:

a] Be transferring it back to DV mini tape and using the Canon
as a playback device connected to a large screen Hi-Def display
and using mini DV tapes for archiving?

b] Archiving the footage on the laptop for playback on the laptop
or connecting the laptop to a large screen Hi-Def display if so
you require a vast amount of HDD capacity and a laptop with a
HDMI output.

c] Archiving the edited footage to removeable media such as DVD or
BluRay?

In answer to your question, my ultimate goal is to make movies, for
which I regard the camcorder as a beginning course. With the camcorder
and laptop I will edit and store footage. This will then be shown on
web based forums like youtube, and hopefully on tv's. I have no
illusions however that at this stage the technical quality will be
good enough for prime time.

Thank you for rolling out the important specs for a laptop. The reason
I refer to "brands" is because I once bought a toshiba laptop that
performed better than all the desktops I sat at year after year. So I
have great respect for toshiba assuming they have not undergone a
decline like sony. While it is true the same factories (many of them
in Hsinchu, Taiwan) assemble many of these computers, it is also true
that individual companies will apply their own quality control.

What you are suggesting is that a laptop should be judged by features
rather than manufacturer. The specs of the Asus you refer to include
250 gigs of storage and 4 gigs of ram. As you say, the 250 gigs of HDD
will be used up quickly, but perhaps not if I use thumb drives or
other storage media to store completed videos, and just use the HDD
for actual editing.

I mentioned the Canon Vixia HV30 is that my research so far indicates
it will take relatively less capacity than more recent flash memory
camcorders. The price point of the ASUS appears to be about 1000 usd.


This is a potent Asus laptop, Asus being an established and
respected "brand"http://tinyurl.com/msouqb
Chosen as an *example* because:
It has that all important firewire port for capturing footage from
a DV camcorder - Canon or any other DV cam.
A HDMI output for connecting your laptop to a large screen Hi-Def
display to view your edited footage in full Hi-Def glory.
An efficient processor and plenty of RAM so it won't flinch at
demanding Hi-Def video editing.
An excellent on-board video chipset to display your Hi-Def footage
A reasonable amount of HDD space - but that will be rapidly
consumed with Hi-Def footage that consumes huge amounts of HDD.
But an all important esata port, this will allow the connection of an
external sata drive to increase capacity upto 1.5 tb, but also to add
an external BluRay burner.

But it's not a recommendation, it can only be an example because
you could get an almost identically configured model from:
Toshibahttp://www.toshiba.com/tai/products/laptops/index.html
Or Dellhttp://www.dell.co.uk/home/laptops
Or from any mainstream or specialist laptop manufacturer.
They will all use the same processors, the same components
the same operating system etc.
It is for you first to discern what exactly you want to do in home
video production, how you want to do it and what your budget is.