I've had a project lined up that is ready to go next week. I was always aware that the company would deliver the project on an external drive to work from. I just found out that the drive is usb2.

Here's the confusion, I've always been aware that fire wire is a little slower than usb2, but being designed to work with video, fire wire deals with it better.

The video has already been captured and will be delivered as files, so I'll basically just be working with the video files. I'd like to avoid having to free up space and transfer all this data to my computer to work with it, it's all additional time that needs avoided.

Is usb2 sufficient to work with in this way?

Thanks,

David.

This is only my personal expirience on my own system.

I have a caddy that can be usb or f wire. In usb mode transfer rates and seek times are much worse than f wire.
Having said that I found I could edit through usb but there were occasional pauses when editing.

Thanks Mark, it's motion graphics work in after effects rather than editing, so it's not sounding too great. A lot of the work will be with 3d layers too, anyone any experience in this way?

Thanks more,

David.

You say "I'd like to avoid having to free up space and transfer all this data to my computer to work with it, it's all additional time that needs avoided." This is the BEST method for video editing, working off an external drive could very easily give you more problems than you want and therefore slow you down. Free up some space on your internal hard disk, copy files onto the external drive, uninstall apps, games, utilities etc you no longer use. Do a disk clean up and the defrag the drive. This way you will have fewer problems rather than more.

My system is fine, game free and has nothing that I don't use on it, but thanks.

I've worked from rushes pre-captured and placed on an external fire wire drive then exported to an internal drive for burning after all the work was done with no problems before. All I really needed to know was how using a usb2 drive rather than a firewire drive would compare, but again, thanks.

David.