[MacDV] Re: External HD sizes

Dwayne Bradley dwayne_bradley at mac.com
Mon Dec 8 12:31:23 PST 2003


Thanks for the input Mark.  I have a PowerBook G4/667 running OS X 10.2.8 w/ 512 MB RAM and a Canon GL/1 camera.  I have heard of the FireWire problem before with Canon cameras but since I have never had an external drive to contend with, I do not know if this would be a problem for me or not.

Does anyone else have experience with this or a similar combination?  If this FireWire issue did come up, would Panther help or is it an issue with hardware?

Again, thanks in advance for any advice.

Dwayne



On Monday, December 08, 2003, at 03:07PM, Mark M. Florida <markf at squareblue.com> wrote:

>Rather than think about your storage needs in terms of finished length, 
>you need to know how much *source* footage you have -- that's where 
>your storage needs should be assessed.  DV requires about 13 GB per 
>hour, so you'd be able to fit about 6 hours of DV source material on an 
>80 GB drive.  As far as RAID goes, single drives should be plenty fast 
>enough for DV work -- so no RAID.  The only thing I can think of that 
>could be a problem, depending on which computer you have and which 
>camera you are using is FireWire issues.  If you're using an older G4 
>(or Blue G3), you may have hiccups writing to FireWire drives while 
>capturing from a FireWire camera.  To get around this problem, you just 
>need to add a PCI FireWire card to add a completely separate FireWire 
>bus (both jacks on G4s use the same bus) -- then connect the drives to 
>that card and your camera to the built-in FireWire ports.  If you're 
>using a PowerBook, you can get a FireWire PC (PCMCIA) card to achieve 
>the same result.
>
>That's my 2 cents.
>
>- Mark F.
>
>On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:44 PM, Dwayne Bradley wrote:
>
>> I have a couple of quick questions that I am sure a genius or two (or 
>> three) on this list can answer for me.
>>
>> I just got my copy of FCE (which by the way I think is awesome 
>> compared to iMovie in the short time that I have got to play with it) 
>> and I am looking at getting a couple of external HD's for external 
>> storage/work space.  I have seen before on this list that the external 
>> HD approach is advisable.  Would two 80GB drives be sufficient for 
>> about 1-2 hours worth of finished video work?  This length of time 
>> would be for all projects that I am working on at the same time (3 to 
>> 4 max), not just one project.  Would you suggest using the drives 
>> independantly or put them into a RAID 0 (stripe) or a RAID 1 (mirror) 
>> configuration?  Also, where do you suggest that I store the project 
>> file?  Internal HD or on one of the external drives?
>>
>> Everyone's opinions and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dwayne Bradley
>>
>>
>



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