invest in a notebook with 16GB RAM. my DELL PC (no notebook) difference from 8 to 16 is like driving a fiat panda and tesla sportser car
Georg

netline wrote:

Lastly the Panos I stitch are never more than 150 images and that is bracketed

150 images, that is today. And tomorrow? I am shure the project will come you need more than 150 images. Much more.

From Asus and Acer there are Laptop models that can utilize up to 32 GB Ram. So my recommendation would be ... better wait one or two months more to be able to pay for the Laptop models with higher ram capacity. Tomorrow rulez, not today.


Greetings from germany
Chris

Personally I am wondering whether it is an alternative to look at the all-in-one's from apple or from HP (z1)
In case they fit the size of carry-on luggage you can have a wonderfull screen and powerfull machine on location/hotelroom wherever you go. 

It might even be cost-effective.

Personally I am looking at something like this http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/p … /radius-ex

xeon, up to 128 GB DR3 memory, integrated 17" 1920 x 1200 and option to clip on a second or thir display.  Just a bit worried about the price ;-)

In general, do you really, really want to process at the location or do you want to use your time there to make more panoramas?


I carry around  acer aspire one netbook (2 GB, 400 euro) and have a 16 GB workstation at home which is on 24/7. Often it is faster to transer all files to the workstation using FTP and then process them using a remote desktop on the workstation. Done that 7800 km from home and it worked fine. just need a decent internet connection.

Sometimes I shoot in JPG+RAW, process the jpg's on my netbook, just to organise the photos into groups en do basic editing. Rendering is even possible, but mostly I FTP evertyhing to my NAS at the office, start up the workstation remotely and 'search and replace"  in every file ".jpg" into ".CR2" Then I reload the project into APG and instead of the jpg's the RAW files are loaded.

But that is all with 30 photos in one pano. for 150 photos you would indeed need much more memory in the laptop even when working in jpg and you need more memory in your wokstation.

netline wrote:

I am interested in buying a laptop to render at clients, with a tight budget I wanted to know if the laptop specs below would suffice if I upgraded the RAM to 8gb.

In 2009 we bought a 17" MacBook Pro. 2,8GHz DualCore and 8GB RAM. I use a Wacom A5 tablet and have a portable kind of workstation with a good screen in a very flat case.

The point is: for shooting with a 15mm fisheye - 7 shots x 7 brackets - it works perfectly. Sitiching, editing and rendering works fluent and fast.
The screen lets me work very comfortably. I´m still using this MBP on tour for controlling - with external drives of course.

It always depends on what you really need to achieve in the end. Doing shootings up to a 35mm lens that works fine. Doing shootings with longer lenses - >50mm -it might get difficult using a laptop - i wouldn´t do it at all.

What i can say after about 7 years of panoshooting: first hand it seems to be very attractive processing the panos at the client´s site on the spot.

But i never do it (besides of quick controls of course). Real good work takes it´s time. "Quick and dirty cheapos" on one side or profoundly elaborated in all aspects on the other side - in the end THAT defines the quality of your work and THIS defines the status of your name . . . which then reflects in your price and the kind of clients who want YOU in person to work on their cases.

But - you must yourself decide what kind of panorama-photographer or -producer you want to be.

I´d always suggest a MacBook Pro for working on the road - like around 75% of the professional photographers i know use. At home i use a MacPro with actually 32GB RAM as my main-machine and a PC with 64GB RAM as a second machine just for rendering.

best, Klaus