External Hard Drive for Video Editing « Videomaker Community Forums

nobody
Member

I recently purchased an Apple Power Mac G4 1250 minitower to use soley for video editing. I had also purchased a video editing software called "Final Cut Express" which sold at a discount if you buy any macintosh. I was reading the literature that came with the software, and it recommends that you use a seperate hard drive to edit your video with. I've been hearing this from quite a few people about the fact that it's a must to use an external hard drive for this purpose.
Is there some special reason why you should use an external hard drive instead of the main drive on your computer to render your video? Is it because your main hard drive is busy running other applications to be able to render smooth video instead of video that has frame drop outs and jumpy video? I plan on purchasing an external hard drive, but I was just wondering if this is what you should do on any computer if you want to edit video and not have any problems with it. I have a Sony computer that I installed an internal slave hard drive to it. Could I use this seperate drive in the Sony to render my video and would it be any better than it is when I try to edit video on the main drive
If anyone has any opinions on this, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks.

Tunes Man.

Posted 8 years ago #
Charles Romano
Member

if your geting a fireWire- ,800- ,external HD you should check this out first-. ,http-://,www.apple.com/macosx/firewire800specialmessage.html
I hope it helps you in any way-.,
Charles

Posted 8 years ago #
mrvideo
Member

The Canopus folks have a little app called Raptest that checks drives for read/write speed to establish their fitness for video capture and edit. If your slave drive is fast enough it's what you need for smooth operation. I've been using a second hard drive for several years for video work, and a while back added an external LaCie 120 GB firewire drive, which is equally problem free and gives me the room to export from one drive to another rather than having a single video drive exporting to itself. For the record it's connected to my win2kpro system through an Audigy Platinum sound card firewire port, and daisy-chained to a second PC running Win98se, to support a firewire network. Doesn't break a sweat.

David Hurdon

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

When you say hard drive for editing are you just using it for editing or caputuring or both!! I know I will need to get a external hard drive but I was just wondering will you use it to capture too!!

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

Yes, I use it to capture video and edit both. From what I've read and from what other people have told me, it's best that you have a second hard drive to download your video you want to edit. I assume one of the main reasons is because your main hard drive contains the software that you will use for your video editing, and if you were to use your main hard drive to download your video and edit it both, it makes your main hard drive do double duty which causes problems such as frame drop outs and other problems.
I was originally going to buy an external hard drive, but was told that an internal one would be better, probably because an external one isn't as fast as an internal one.
When you get one, get as big as one as you can afford, because loading video onto your computer takes up a lot of space on the hard drive.

Tunesman.

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

Tunesman thanks for your input!! So you think the internal is better than the external. Is it hard to install a interanl hard drive?

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

Yes, for myself, an internal hard drive was the better choice. I've heard that external hard drives don't operate as fast as an internal one. As far as installing one, the manual that came with my G4 shows you step by step how to install an extra hard drive. My problem came in setting it up so that it would show up on my desktop. I ended up calling the manufacturer of the hard drive I bought and they told me what to do.
If an internal hard drive is what you want and you're not sure how install one, you'd probably better have someone do it for you because it can be tricky, especially with all the wires and complex riggings inside the computer. I'm not saying that an external hard drive won't work because they do, and they work just as good as an internal,
but I was concerned about the speed issue of the external as opposed to the internal. If you'd rather have an external, they're a lot easier to install the an internal.
Good luck on your choice.

Tunesman.

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

External's are easier to install and don't require opening up the guts of the computers. I have a maxtor 5000dv. It's 200gb and works like a charm. You'll see no difference in video quality between a firewire 400 and a firewire 800. The only adavantage would be transferring files to and from the drive. Just make sure you get a 7200 rpm and get as much space as you can, because it's cheap. And you can never have too much hard drive space when working with video.

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

Since I already have my internal hard drive installed, I'm pretty well set for extra hard drive space. If I want to add a third hard drive though, my Mac G4 allows for that as another internal hard drive. Installing an internal hard drive may require some extra work, but I prefer an internal as opposed to an external because it doesn't require you to make extra room to set it somewhere outside of your computer, plus I don't have to use up one of my two firewire inputs, which I may want to use for other purposes. My G4 makes access to the inside easy because all
you have to do is grab a latch and the whole side lies open. This makes access to the inside much easier to work on than some computers.
For those of you who prefer an external hard drive and that's what works good for you, I say go for it. I wasn't aware that all you had to do was get a 7200rpm and it would be as quick as an internal.

Tunesman.

Posted 8 years ago #