Can you recommend external harddrive to capture&edit vid

rjamesd · #1 (**permalink**) 03-20-2005, 09:45 PM

Hi,
Can you recommend an external harddrive to capture and edit video?
I would like it to have Firewire400,800 and USB2.0 connectors.

I know that Adobe have not tested external drives with their software but from reading this forum I see that several people are using them with success. SO what brand would you recommend?

I looked at the Lacie D2 but seems there are mixed reviews on this. Some people rate it highly while others say it is more style than substance.

I plan to get a Firewire 800 PCMCIA card to slot into my notebook and plug the drive into this. My notebook has a Firewire 400 port to which the DV camera is connected.

The notebook is a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 1Gb RAM on Windows XP Pro and WUXGA 1900x1200 widescreen 15.4" screen and at the moment I capture to my notebook's only internal harddrive (a 7200rpm 60Gb parallel ATA 100 drive, probably the Hitachi 7K60). This works perfectly fine in capture with no dropped frames. Though I find I need to defrag after about 3 weeks of use as there is a short delay before playing back clips and defrag cures this.

I have Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and am capturing using a Panasonic consumer camcorder and Canon top model Prosumer camera.

I would like to capture to the notebook's internal harddrive (this works fine) and then move the capture across to the external drive and edit from there. Any comments?

I would like also to capture to the external drive directly. Any comments?

Also, can Firewire 800 drives support HDV/high definition video?

Thanks,
Rob

Mike Thorpe · #2 (**permalink**) 03-21-2005, 06:50 AM

I don't really have musch experience of external drives other than LaCie, and even then, it's only the firewire400 versions, but even teh 400 versions seem reasonably fast.

As for the drives supporting HDV, I may be wrong here, but I'm assuming that's irrelevant anyway. As far as I know, seeing as HDV can in theory use the same miniDV tapes as SDV, the bandwidth of the video is the same, but using a slightly higher level of compression to fit all the data in, which means it uses the same amount of data, so yes, it should be ok. The only bottlenexk with handling HDV would come from the performance of your PC itself.

But it's early morning, I may be talking nonsense

Andy Lockwood · #3 (**permalink**) 03-21-2005, 08:22 AM

I use an Iomga 120Gb external drive from my latop. It connects with either USB2 or Firewire. It has been great and the price of that one is coming down all the time, although bigger sizes are available too.
Try www.dabs.com , they always have good prices for hardware, quick delivery and good service too.
(note) I usually capture to that drive and render to my laptop drive. It performs better than capturing to notebook drive.

Alan Mills · #4 (**permalink**) 03-21-2005, 11:54 AM

Be aware that the last time I looked Adobe did not support the use of external HHDs for editing. I suspect that this statement backdates to the days when external drives could not sustain throughput. However, if you ever need to call Adobe I suspect thatt eh first thing they'll say is don't use a networked or external drive and call us back if you still have the problem.

I suspect that any new external HDD would have no particular issues but mentioning this as a point of interest.