Congrats to our HP EliteBook Winner

We got some great entries for our HP EliteBook giveaway, but there can only be one winner. And that winner is Chris Hocking, whose “server room shower” took top place with an inventive install to get the job done in pinch.

When going through expansion at the facility where he works, they had to find somewhere to safely house their Avid Unity, Mac Mini server, routers and Drobo backup drives. In the end, they were all conveniently stored in a shower room, whilst they built a proper home for it all. The best part was the available shower pipe drain, which they used as a cable trough to run the cables to the edit suite downstairs.

Hocking is a young film-maker based in Melbourne, Australia. After traveling the world doing live event lighting design, he followed his childhood dream and moved into the world of film and television. He started his own production company LateNite Films, which is currently in the post production stages for their first feature film, with several more feature film and short film projects in development. Hocking is also is the Post Production Supervisor at the boutique editorial company, The Butchery, and their sister company, The Refinery.

Congratulations, Chris! And thanks for being such a supporter of fxguide and our sister site fxphd.

 

The EliteBook and Mari

We’ve been testing out the EliteBook in various applications to see how it holds up under the demands of production. At NAB, I had the chance to show the EliteBook to Jack Greasley, who is the product manager for The Foundry’s Mari 3D texture painting application. Mari is a very GPU-intensive application and all of the recommended graphics cards on The Foundry web site are NVIDIA cards. I ran into him checking into the hotel and he saw me carrying it…and he wanted to have a play with it. Several of the staff have been using previous generations to demo the software and show it off at trade shows and he was interested in seeing the lastest generation.

He was pretty blown away by it. We loaded up one his setups of a high res dinosaur, which contained over 2.1 billion triangles. And it didn’t prove to be a problem at all….the app remained incredibly responsive. Another thing he noticed was that the app seemed to tax the current EliteBook less than the previous generation.  He expected the fans to go off under high stress, but that didn’t happen and it was much quieter than his other experiences.

Now he has a serious case of EliteBook evny…

Another disclaimer here about the EliteBook. HP has provided fxguide with not only our loaner test machine, but also the giveaway talked about in this article. We mention this because while we’ve been giving our honest opinions about the product, we don’t want to hide that it was supplied to us. The fact is, this is a serious, solid, professional portable workstation — not your grandmother’s notebook. We feel it could fit into any high end remote production workflow…and will be taking it through its paces to find out. Especially after getting used to the DreamColor display — I  wish the macbook pro had this as an option. Doubt that’s gonna happen.

1 thought on “Congrats to our HP EliteBook Winner”

  1. Congratz Chris!

    Will all sent in entries be put up on the page eventually? I’m curious to see what crazy things people are up to out there. =)

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