[MacDV] Re: 200 gig hard drive vs. dividing hard imac drive

[Michael Winter]

On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 05:48  PM, sb wrote:

> So, captured media on the external, projects saved on the internal.
>
> Make sure you only have one firewire device plugged into the computer.
> You'll need to daisy chain the drive with a camera or converter box.

I'm fairly new to this, so I don't understand why you would want to do 
it this way : daisy chain vs each plugged into the computer. Especially 
since I've been doing the latter without any trouble. Maybe if I 
explain my thinking, you can tell me where I'm going wrong.

Even though Firewire is a peer-to-peer protocol, my assumption was that 
the video stream has to go from the video device (camera or converter) 
to the computer, then to the drive (that's how it works for internal 
drives) anyway. If that is the case, then you're forcing two video 
streams (in from device, out to drive)  to share the bandwidth of a 
single Firewire port (400 Mbps). By plugging the video device and the 
drive each into the their own plug on the Mac, each stream has 400 Mbps 
to play with, since each plug on most (all?) Macs is a separate bus.

Am I wrong about that assumption? Is FCP (or iMovie) just 
initiating/terminating transfers between peers? IOW, is the one video 
stream from the video device being saved by the drive and monitored by 
the computer? Unfortunately the documentation for iMovie doesn't even 
come close to giving this kind of information and I don't have FCP.

-Mike