Laptop for Watchout Programming

[Byoosing]

Hi-

I am a video projection designer for theatre and I am hoping for some advice on which laptop to buy that I can install Watchout on to pre-program my shows from home. I need a laptop powerful enough to previz my programming before I walk into the theatre, but I do not need it to run a show. The laptop I want to buy I also plan on using as an editing computer for Adobe After Effects, Premiere, and some 3-D modeling. 

A Dell XPS-15 is one of the laptops that I am considering that fits all my specs for an editing laptop, but will it work for programming Watchout?

Here are the specs:

• 15. 6" 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) InfinityEdge anti-reflective touch IPS 100% a do be RGB 500-nits Display
• 9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750h (12MB Cache, up to 4. 5 GHz, 6 Cores)
• 16GB DDR4-2666MHz, 2x8G
• 1TB PCIe SSD
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5

• System Ram Type: Ddr4 Sdram

Any red flags here with these specs and is there anything else I need to program with Watchout that this laptop doesn't provide. 

Thank you in advance for any help provided. 

 

 

 

[artLab]

Every time I program on a laptop without a proper network port, I regret it.  You can always do usb, but the connection is always pretty spotty.

[RBeddig]

Looks like a good choice, but make sure to uninstall all unneccessary bloatware from DELL since those might influence the stability and perfomance of a computer.

Depending on the number of outputs and codecs used in your show, the videos might still stutter a bit in your stage preview. This is normal since the stage window also acts as a "display computer" and needs to read all videos from your SSD, push the pixels through CPU and GPU , scale it down and render it. So in a larger show, which maybe uses 4 servers with 4 outputs, your production computer tries to simulate the load and performance of those 4 big servers. You can turn the video preview off and set it to thumbnails once your timing is correct.

[Carlo]

I'm using right now a Dell XPS 15 (9570) and for me it's working well, even if I've never had issue with the ethernet adapter I'm always  sure to have at least twice when i'm out for work, generally different brand.

The only thing, sometimes 1TB is not really enough, I've bought my XPS with 1TB and after a year I've upgraded with a 2 TB NVMe drive.

During warping, battery power, generally i can work for 5-6 Hours without a lot of problem, and as RBedding said it's really usefull to make a clean install of windows as first thing, there are only one thing you should install after and is "dell power manager" which let you have a lot of control in power settings.

[matkeane]

8 hours ago, RBeddig said:

Depending on the number of outputs and codecs used in your show, the videos might still stutter a bit in your stage preview. This is normal since the stage window also acts as a "display computer" and needs to read all videos from your SSD, push the pixels through CPU and GPU , scale it down and render it. So in a larger show, which maybe uses 4 servers with 4 outputs, your production computer tries to simulate the load and performance of those 4 big servers. You can turn the video preview off and set it to thumbnails once your timing is correct.

Another way to manage the load on a laptop producer, while still using video previews, is to use Stage Tiers. If you assign parts of your show to separate Tiers, you can choose which to preview on the production machine. Alternatively you can encode low-res/low data-rate preview files and place them on a 'preview' Tier, only rendered on the production machine, so that you have a visible reference (even a BITC in case of corrections requiring a re-render) for timing, but without overloading the machine.

[Byoosing]

Thank you so much for the input, much appreciated!