Would a quad core laptop work well with 1080p camcorder footage ?

[jamieuk23]

Or would a faster dual core CPU suite best ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I assume you want to encode and edit the video on the notebook?

Whether you go with a dual core or a quad core processor depends on the program you are using for encoding.

[TheAnimus]

don't forget to watch the hard drive speed.

if your doing any editing they can be a real bottleneck in a laptop.

[jamieuk23]

Yer edit etc with sony vegas. Does that use 4 cores ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sony Vegas 9 will benefit from having more cores or threads:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1289/9/

[arthurleung]

don't forget to watch the hard drive speed.

if your doing any editing they can be a real bottleneck in a laptop.

In fact not. 1080P lossless compressed footage is ~20MB/s at 1x speed. If doing any real "editing" it will likely to be CPU bounded not hard drive.

[TheAnimus]

Erm until you say have to page memory, or load a clip of video, the seek time and throughput become important.

[oolon]

In fact not. 1080P lossless compressed footage is ~20MB/s at 1x speed.

Does that including read and writing a stream? The fact it is being written will mean the drive does not perform well due to seeking.

[arthurleung]

Does that including read and writing a stream? The fact it is being written will mean the drive does not perform well due to seeking.

The queue depth will be low enough not to be a problem. It is effectively two sequencial streams and windows cache and ncq will deal with it easily.

Unless it is a badly designed program, 1080p editing need well less than 256MB of memory (I use avisynth). If in any case that you need more than say 768MB of memory, it WILL be CPU bounded, unless you're using loads of stackhorizontal/stackvertical or is using filters in an inefficient way (particularly with avisynth).

In very rare case of running multiple instances of 1080p editing which memory usage does become a problem it will be so CPU-bounded that the disk utilization will be well under the limit.