Capturing and editing on external hard drive

[BlueDevil]

I have a Sony laptop which comes with a range of video editing/authoring software. The problem is it has a relatively small hard drive which limits me to about 1.5 hours of raw video which is too small to run more than one project at a time. I am wondering about using an external hard drive (which I could also use on my desktop computer). Is there any issue with transfer rates to an external hard drive? Will I be able to capture video just as effectively as with a fast internal hard drive? Any other issues to consider for a newbie to video editing?

Thanks!

 

[Rick Murchison]

Is there any issue with transfer rates

So far I haven't found one that's fast enough, even the one I have that's firewire.
YMMV
Rick

 

[bob1dp]

I edit using Premier on my desk top. It is very buggy. Crashing all the time and fragmenting my hard drive. If you are really serious I would consider Final Cut Pro and a Mac system. That said I am still a PC user and I do edit on my system. I finally installed a “Raided” hard drive into my computer. This is two hard drives that sync together and work as one. External hard drives don’t work well because the information gets jammed up moving back and forth from drive to computer. Also PC sometimes see the external drive as a camera so your computer is constantly asking if the drive is a camera further slowing things up. I do not recommend using you primary hard drive for editing as the fragmenting can become severe.

 

[Kim]

So far I haven't found one that's fast enough, even the one I have that's firewire.
YMMV
Rick

Is that a fairly new drive Rick? I have an external Firewire drive for school - 7200rpm. I have never had a problem capturing to it - no dropped frames etc. It's completely dedicated as a data drive - if you use one, don't put any program software on it at all.

 

[miket]

I have also used a fairly new external Firewire drive (200gb) and captured and edited from it with no problem. I used both my Dell laptop (P4 2.4 ghz and my Athelon 3200XP desktop with the same drive, no problems). I use Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0.

Rendering the finished product seemed to take longer on the external drive, but it worked fine.

- MikeT
http://www.socaldivevideos.com

 

[BlueDevil]

Thanks for the advice so far. It sounds like an external hard drive isn't an option unless it is a Firewire version. My other option would be to upgrade my desktop PC. I would need to add:
- Firewire card
- Large and fast internal hard drive
- dual layer DVD burner
- maybe some more RAM (I've got 512 at present)

All the above items can be added at a fairly reasonable cost (not sure how the cost would compare with the external hard drive option for the laptop). The main problem is that I would have to go and buy some editing software (the software that comes with the Sony computer is pre-loaded onto the laptop and as far as I can see can't be loaded onto another computer). This could add quite a bit to the cost, and also would leave me in the position of having to decide which program to go with (not an easy choice for a begginner with no experience of the different programs)

 

[Kim]

You can't avoid Firewire as that is the output from the camera usually. However you could also use an external USB2 drive - it is a faster transfer speed than Firewire as long as nothing else is using the USB bus at the same time. If you get an internal drive get the fastest one possible. If you can afford SCSI then they are the best and fastest.
You can get by with 512 RAM - although more is better and will help with your rendering times. Software is something else. This recent thread has quite a lot of information about current software.

 

[peterbkk]

On my Mac G5, I have added a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB external Firewire 800 drive. It has no problem keeping up with all the video editing tasks, including capture, print-to-tape and exporting to DVD.

 

[BlueDevil]

I think my ignorance is showing :06: and I am getting a little lost here! I presumed that if i added an external hard drive to my laptop I would still connect my video camera to the laptop via a firewire cable and that the external hard drive would connect to the laptop via a USB connection. Is that the way it works? So when people talk of an external firewire drive what is that, in comparison to any other hard drive???

 

[Kim]

OK. These are all interfaces between the different devices and the CPU. External harddrives can be either USB2 (you don't want a USB1 device even if it existed as the data transfer rate is very slow), or Firewire.
Now although Firewire transfers data at 400Mbps/sec and USB2 transfers data at 480Mbps/sec, because of the architecture difference Firewire connections are more efficient and achieve a faster data transfer in reality. If you have two firewire ports on your laptop then the best would be to get a Firewire drive and plug the drive into one port, and the camera into the other. Failing that you can 'daisy chain' Firewire devices so you could buy a cable splitter or hub with two or more ports on it and connect a Firewire drive and the camera to that.
You can also get a USB2 harddrive that connects to a fast USB2 port. Then the computer processor has to route between the two busses and move the data across.

One thing though. Using a laptop to capture high quality video is always going to be problematic due to the other constraints of the laptop. They are not really built for this type of work and other factors might make it rather impractical. What I would suggest is using your desktop to capture onto a Firewire drive - and then you can play with the captured footage on your laptop simply by connecting the Firewire drive to it. It'll probably be quite slow at rendering etc. - but you won't lose any frames. As you already have a port on the laptop, you'd just need a Firewire card for the desktop with 2 or more ports - and a Firewire harddrive.