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capture
what is the best hard disk for video capturing, i’m using sony vegas 7 and sony DVcam through firewire
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7 Replies
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Any modern hard drive can handle DV capture but I would still make sure it’s a 7200RPM and not the 5400RPM drive. Get a big one because DV capture is 13GB/hr. I would also use an internal drive, eSATA drive, or firewire drive, and not a USB drive. You want to make sure there is enough bandwidth to the drive to sustain live capture.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
im using seagate barracuda 7200.10 but i’m having alot of drop frames although i tested the firewire cable and the firewire card and they’re ok, so the problem is in the hard drive and i’m consuming alot of hard drive because each period of time i have this problem
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A reliable one;). But seriously I would avoid Lecie like the plague. Everyone I know who has had problems with external hard drives it has almost always been a Lacie.
I would go for eSATA father than USB as it is like having an internal one in terms of performance and get 7200 spin speed one (as already mentioned).
I would also consider some type of RAID or drobo or array. They work in sets of 4 or more drives and if a single one goes down you wont loose anything. Having a hard drive crash near the end of a edit is a great way to loose clients.
In terms of the make of drive any well known brand (apart from Lacie) should do.
Ben
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That hardrive will easily handle the throughput unless it is VERY badly fragmented or there is some type of HW problem. Are you using the same firewire card for the camera and the drive? In the old avid days we used to use a 2nd (could be any cheap) card for drive as capturing on a firewire card that was also connected to a drive was a problem but this was a long time ago.
Reeboot, Defrag the drive and try again.
Ben
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[hassan hajj] “im using seagate barracuda 7200.10 but i’m having alot of drop frames “
Is this a separate hard drive? or is this your C: drive also? You want to capture to a separate physical hard drive.
As Ben said, make sure it is defragmented; especially free space fragmentation.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
ANY dropped frames is unacceptable. Your camera spits the data through the firewire at a constant rate (25 mb/sec, or 3.6 mB/sec). Its destination is your hard disk drive. If something in the data path clogs up the flow, then you will get dropped frames. Most of the time the problem is that the hard disk can’t write at that rate because it’s seriously fragmented or the processor may be busy doing something else and can’t get around to servicing the I/O protocol fast enough. Especially on systems with only one hard-disk drive. Antivirus programs frequently get in the way of a Firewire data transfer. A bad Firewire cable may be noisy, corrupting a data frame (AKA Data Packet), resulting in a dropped frame. I’ve never seen dirty heads in the camera cause dropped frames. Data dropouts, yes, but not dropped frames. Similar but not the same.
Do NOT turn off the “Abort Capture on Dropped Frames” or whatever your favorite editing program calls it. As I said above, ANY dropped frames is unacceptable.
Your video media should be on a separate drive from your operating system – not a separate partition (because that’s on the same drive).
For capturing DV tape, I always use scenalyzer live (https://www.scenalyzer.com/)
For HDV tape I use HDV Split (https://www.videohelp.com/tools/HDVSplit).RAID is unnecessary in my experience – at least for speed considerations. I routinely capture DV tapes through a dual-core laptop into an external hard disk plugged into a USB 2.0 port and never a dropped frame. 5400 RPM drives should be avoided because their maximum sustained write speed is not much higher (in general) than the DV data flow, but I have used 5400 RPM drives with mixed success.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Hassan
I would be looking at the point of capture i.e. the camera.
Dropped frames can sometime result from faulty tape stock, or mixing wet and dry tape formulations. You mentioned DVCAM so I am assuming tape here… .
If it is a tape based camera, it might be time for a head clean.
If it a really old camera, it may be due for a recording drum head servicing.
Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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