We have a fair amount of equipment around here and I have been playing with this setup for the last few days and am loving.

We  have a bunch of old XP Toshiba tablets PC’s.   I LOVE these computers.  They are a full laptop, that with a swivel of the screen , becomes a pen input tablet.   I do lots of photoshoping on it since it has direct pressure sensitive pen input, its like directly drawing on paper.    Since they are a full laptop, they will run any windows software easy enough.   Unfortunately, these units are getting harder and harder to find.  They were semi big about ten years ago.     Since then, nothing else has come close to offering the  same functionality.  They were also not the most powerful of computers even back then, usually having a celeron P4 processor.

This unit is setup with Adobe Premier 6.5 (an older version, but hey it works)   and I can hook up the Sony Vx-2000 camera directly via firewire and record digital footage directly onto the laptops hard drive bypassing the tape all together..   Since it’s running premier as the video editor, i can also edit directly int he field and see exactly what we just recorded.

I can also do audio checks using any number of audio programs and again, can record audio directly into the  digital production workflow with this setup.

However, the word is out today that Microsoft is releasing the surface Pro 3.  That has pen input and can run just about any win programs.   We’re upgrading all the cameras to DSLRs  currently and getting away from dedicated video camreas and I’m thinking of getting a surface Pro to replace the aging Toshibas since the functionality will be about the same, with a vast increase of processing power, but damb, I hate that win 8 interface!

Here’s a  Picture of the setup!

camrea_set_up