Bad notebook for camming?
I recently sold my MSI GX60 because I never used it for anything other than the internet. The quality for camming was perfect, but downgraded to a brand new HP Pavilion 10-f005AU. I asked the guy in the store if it would be okay for skype calls, telling hime that I had a webcam already. He said yes. He said, and I quote, "prettty much all you need is good internet". So I bought it. When I tried camming it's an absolute piece of shit, freezing all the time, and lagging horribly whenever it wasn't freezing. So, did the guy at the store flat out lie to me or what?
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
Let me preface this by saying that I don't know anything about notebooks.
What I do know is that salesmen will tell you whatever to make a sale. I recommend researching for yourself the specs of machine, and the bare minimum of what you need before actually buying anything. :s Don't trust the salesmen.
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
I don't know, in the same store I asked a guy about a phone who flat out told me to go to their biggest competitors because what they sold wouldn't be good for the phone company I'm with. Also I just tried out omegle video chat, absolutely flawless! I really don't know. Then again, MFC seems to be turning to absolute shit in terms of video quality.
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
Well I googled both computers (you didn't say which MSI GX60), and what I can find is you went from a top of the line AMD processor to a very below average one. You went from 8gb of ram to 2gb of ram. And lost more than half of your harddrive space. All of those things effect video quality from my understanding.
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
Something that might be ok for Skype calls is not going to be good enough for a professional camgirl, if you want to make a good living.
Because I splitcam and do a lot of video editing I shoot for an i7 processor and at least 8 gb of ram. I have 16 gb at the moment and I love the performance.
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
Microcenter is a really good store to buy from because all of their reps are very knowledgeable about computers and hardware. A lot of people go there to buy parts to build their own PC's so they have to be extremely well versed on computers specs.
A desktop will always outperform a laptop. I highly recommend using one for the majority of your shows and possibly using your laptop for shower shows or shows you need to move into a different room. I had an i3 laptop but it was crap, I now have a really "good" i7 but even that has its problems with streaming. My husband recently built a computer and its a beast, I used it a couple times for shows and it made all the difference.
Re: Bad notebook for camming?
Agreed that the two largest factors affecting camming performance are the CPU benchmark speed, as well as the amount of available memory.
In regard to CPU's generally speaking, to cam without any hiccups you need an Intel I7 processor, an AMD A10 processor, or a particularly fast version of an Intel I5 or AMD A6 processor . Between streaming video encoding and other video streaming tasks, processors slower than this may not be able to 'keep up' with HD video resolution and frame rates, and streaming will jump / lag. Lots of particulars factor into this, though. Model of CPU is essentially a 'front end' decision which is an inherent part of selecting the particular model of new computer to purchase.
In regard to RAM, depending on the particular operating system being run, at least 6 gigs are necesssary to cam without hiccups. If the operating system + running programs + buffered video stream data exceeds available memory, it will force the computer to 'page'. This involves writing out part of ram content to the disk, erasing that portion of ram so another task can use it, then reading back the original ram content from the disk, to resume the previous task. Since even the fastest disk reads and writes are ~20 times slower than ram reads and writes, once 'paging' starts to occur overall speed drops like a proverbial stone. Fortunately, ram is fairly cheap and can usually be added after the fact.