The problem: 'effective sharing between friends of equipment'
I am making a film with a friend using my 4 month old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop running Adobe Premiere Pro. We can only do this in our spare time, which is 2 or 3 hours a week and perhaps 6 hours at the weekend, sometimes more.
We are new to Adobe Premiere Pro and have been editing the film for 3 months and we are getting there but feel frustrated by the limited time we have each week and how long it is taking. We are both keen to finish the film soon but want to do a good job. My friend has a little more time available than me to spend on the film but obviously cannot do it without my being there.
The solution:
I am not prepared to lend him my 1200pound laptop though I am prepared to spend a little bit of cash on cost effective solutions. The solution I am seriously considering is lending him my 5 year old PC upgraded to DV capability for around 250 pounds.
I'm happy to spend some money as I want to upgrade the PC anyway for use as an entertainment media server (e.g. MP3 player/PVR)/experimental server/Sound module(it already has a nice Yamaha sound card) later on and this spec seems good enough for those. So it's not necessarily throwing away money.
It's based around a QDI Advance 9 PC133 motherboard which can take 768Mb RAM max. Here's what I think I need to do:
- change the Processor from current 600MHz Pentium 3 to 1066Mhz Pentium 3 for about 25 pounds
- obtain 3 x 256 Mb PC133 168pin SDRAM for about 20 pounds each
- get a belkin PCI firewire card 25 pounds
- get an external firewire hard drive for my friend to save work on for use with the laptop when we meet. (120 pounds)
The rest of the hardware is already there and can be reused I think - graphics card, PSU, nice HTPC case etc.
I know where to get the parts and I don't expect the PC to be as fast as today's but I expect it to be good enough for editing DV on Premiere Pro.
Am I right?
:
Any other thoughts welcome
sharing between friends/upgrade 5yr oldPC to DV/cheap DV PC 
Linear Mode
