Capturing and editing on external hard drive

[BlueDevil]

Thanks again for all the info guys!

 

[Rick Murchison]

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.

Yeah, it's new. I think it's probably some interface glitch between the card I'm using (a pretty cheap one) and the drive. This drive has both firewire and USB II and the USB II is actually smoother - neither is satisfactory for me.
The Firewire card works just fine capturing from the DV camera to the internal drive though... FM, don'tchaknow...
Rick

 

[TeddyDiver]

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.

Having the same issue on my laptop (VAIO 616) the choice is propably Firewire HD and DVD burner. Anyway in this model the USB is still 1.1 and not usable to this purpose. The laptop anyway gots 3 Firewire places to connect all the necessary items at once. The Firewire cable should be 4/6 for the HD! and wrecken for the burner too?

 

[BlueDevil]

In the end I decided to upgrade my desktop PC for video editing by adding a dual layer DVD burner, a fast 200GB hard drive and firewire card. Now I can store 13+hours of raw video on the hard drive, and therefore run several projects at once. I think this was probably a better choice than using the laptop with an external drive. (But I wouldn't mind getting an external hard drive to extend the laptops storage capabilities, and also to be able to carry info around with me when the finances allow)

Cheers, Dave