FVM April 2015

[col lamb]

Alas Howard Gregory too late was the cry.

I feel for you with the Laptop issue and you seem to have taken advice if your (Thanks Colin) comment refers to my PC Spec sticky.

Laptops are fickle, I have an ASUS N56V which performs great & I can edit AVCHD in realtime on it. Now for the big BUT, I did my research well and found that ASUS had about 20 different permutations of my N56V all of which were labelled as N56V's. Even the technophobes reading this will see that it becomes pot luck getting what you want. I took an SD card into the PC World where I bought the ASUS and opened up the AVCHD files and run them without issue, I also negotiated a full refund if it did not perform how I wanted it to after installing Adobe CS. Two years later the laptop has been faultless and is now being used to type this post.

If only Howard had posted what they were considering I could have advised on caution, as it turns out I would have said that 4Gb RAM is too small, 2Gb RAM for each CPU core is an absolute MINIMUM, my own 4 core ASUS has 8Gb RAM.

For any DTV laptop it is best to source them from the likes of DVC etc.

One minute searching the net and Howard's problem was not the only time there has been such issues, the techies at PC World should be paid in bananas for if they had looked they would have found the workaround.

The moral of the tale: do your homework and seek advice before parting with the cash.

PC Sales staff at the likes of PC World are just that, they sell stuff, take their advice with a whole packet of Saxo.

[Dave Watterson]

Gosh Col, you must be at the top of the mailing list for FVM ! I don't expect to get ours until early March.

That means I can only guess at Howard's problem.

But
(a) we are always grateful for the sticky post (i.e. one which stays at the top of the topics list) in which you recommend decent specifications for the kind of computers we need.
and
(b) what hope is there for most of us when faced with the situation you describe when the differences between what seem to be the same model of computer can be enough to cause success or failure. Your advice on going to a specialist dealer makes great sense. You may pay a little more than you might at a "box-shifting" place like PC World but you can be confident that what you get will work as expected.

[Dave Watterson]

Our copy of FVM arrived only today and i have been skimming articles between writing film crits for BIAFF. At last I understand what you mean, Col.

Howard writes about problems buying a laptop to playback A-V sequences. It seems impossible on his one to bring the pukka graphics card into play, so images are displayed using the lacklustre graphics chip on the motherboard. The problem is that A-V people frequently use Pics-2-Exe a program, which as its name suggests, creates an *.EXE executable file for playback on computers.

The laptop allows many programs to be associated with the fancy graphics card, but not *.exe files .

One issue is that the AV program is still using a technique that most of us would consider outdated, though I believe it does allow the creation of DVDs so can presumably make some sort of video files. The obvious solution would be for it to allow for output as HD video more like BluRay.

Tech should make things easier !

[Brian Saberton]

I have an Asus laptop that I think is part of the same model range and I don't have any problems with either production of sequences produced in Pictures to exe or with the playback of exe files. I ran some AV sequences at ECVS recently directly from the lap top, plugged into a full HD projector, and they looked great on the big screen. Where I have had problems is in editing HD video and while shorter projects have been reasonably trouble free, a longer film I edited recently proved to be a bit of a nightmare even with an i7 processor and 6gb RAM.