Hi,

Hoping someone can advise from prior knowledge of using external devices for video editing.

I need to use my wife's fast PC, which is owned by her company so playing with internal drives is a bit of a no no.

I would like to know if an external hard drive and external DVD writer are viable options, and would they be USB?

I have heard that http://www.lacie.com/uk/ have good products, any ideas or suggestions welcome.

And what is a RAID set up, always mentioned but never understood!

Thanks in advance for any help

[vonhosen]

RAID explained

I have never needed external hard drives. (I make sure I have tidy housekeeping with my large internal drives.)

Plenty of people use large external drives to store video on & move between computers (Can be Firewire or USB2). This is becoming pretty cost effective option for video editors.

Burning with an external DVD writer shouldn't cause too many problems either.

[klr10]

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It was introduced for large-scale computer systems many years ago to replace the large and highly expensive mainframe type drives. Basically the concept is that you replace one big expensive drive with many small, cheap ones. There are several RAID levels from zero to ten (and a few others) which determine how the data is stored on them and how fault tolerant the scheme is (ie whether the data will survive a single or multiple failure). The different RAID levels are explained at http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html
Hope this helps..

[Duncan Craig]

Hello, Forget about RAID, total overkill for what you need.

I guess you will be using a MiniDV camera capturing through a firewire port?

So get external Firewire Harddrives, LaCie or new Maxtor (One Touch?) models are the only decent choice. USB2 is not up to the job (it's faster in theory than FW but chokes on DV I believe). You could get your own External FW housings but and drop IDE drives in them. Make sure the housing has an Oxford 911 chip in it, and that the HD is 7200RPM with 8MB cache if poss. All the FW drives have two ports so you can connect the camera to the PC via the FW device and digitise back to it at the same time.

I think that covers it...

Duncan,

I wasn't going for RAID anyway, just curious!.

I will be using a firewire port to capture DV, I currently use my fathers machine but want to remove my films from his drive and transfer to another, I have no problem putting in a firewire card on my other PC if the firewire drive is the recommended choice. However I may also like to use the external drive for data storage from my laptop, which has USB. This is where the dilemma is... You mention that USB chokes on DV - in what way? At the end of the day I really want a drive that I can capture to, from DV, do some editing, and then transport to another machine and read back again. (The laptop backup was a hopeful addition)

Thanks for advice

Barrie
1664

[Duncan Craig]

You could capture directly to the FW HD through the PC, and if you get an enclosure with USB and FW you could then use it on any computer.

But I believe USB2 will not support sustained DV data rates. It has too many overheads, OS chatter etc, so although faster than FW in theory it won't always cut it for DV editing. It will transfer files around OK though.

I hope I'm making sense for you?! So get an enclosure with USB2 and FW and stuff a nice big drive in it. Go on you know you want to!

Im just about to get myself a Maxtor one-touch external HDD, it has both FW and USB2 ports as well as the Oxford chip, 7200rpm and 8mb cache that Duncan suggested.
The Maxtor drives are also much cheaper than the Lacie ones it seems and im getting a 250gb one for £203 inc VAT. Lacie's are much more i think.