[MacDV] Problem exporting to tape--iMovie4

[Steve Robertson]

I have a G4 iMac, an external firewire drive and Final Cut Express. 
I've noticed a couple of things about this combination. First, you 
can't just go in the Prefs, set your external firewire drive as a 
scratch disk, and assume this change will hold true forever. There's 
some situation that wipes out your choice of the external firewire 
drive as a scratch disk, but I haven't figured out yet what does this.

Second - and more important - the manual says that video will be 
captured to whichever disk has the most space available. So, if you 
have three or four projects going, it's very easy to reach a point 
where you have 30 gigabytes of space on your external drive, but 35 
gigs of space on your internal drive. Then FCE will automatically 
switch to capturing on the internal drive. Is the solution to remove 
your internal drive from the scratch disk list? I've been afraid to try 
this without knowing for sure.

Steve R.

On Thursday, September 16, 2004, at 05:05  PM, R B Williams wrote:

> This is bound to be an issue with drive throughput "speed". You cannot 
> reliably
> run video from the same drive where the OS resides. As you work a 
> project over
> time the drive has to search more and more to find what it needs next.
>
> Computer speed has little to do with this. The drive (and its 
> controller) are
> the limiting factors.
>
> For smooth sailing in all kinds of weather I recommend a hardware raid 
> setup.
>
> R.B.
>
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