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Daisy chain external preview through external hard drive?
I’m very new here, but I need a new external hard drive for my first FCP project. Right now I have a Mini but will upgrade to a G5 sometime this summer if all goes well. I’ll be making a DV25 copy of digibeta material to work on my mini as an offline, and will make an online with the digibeta.
Here’s my dilema, I need the firewire port out of the mini for the external preview, but I’ll also need that firewire port for the external hard drive. I spoke with a Lacie presales person who suggested I daisy chain my camera (used to send the video to my external monitor) into the fw400 port of their Big Disk Extreme and use their fw800 port with an adaptor to plug into the Mini’s fw400 port. He said this kind of daisy chaining was common and something Mac’s boast about a lot. He also said I’d lose a little bit of speed, but it probably wouldn’t be noticable and I’d be safe as far as capturing video w/o dropping frames. I’ve done some searching here, and there seem to be some issues with daisy chaining, so I was unsure if this was a wise idea. My alternatives see to be:
1- buying a Lacie Big Disk (not an “Extreme” model), but this is supposed to have much slower fw800 speeds. So, it wouldn’t be a great investment when I upgrade to a G5.
or
2- Buy a firewire hub. Granite digital makes some, but I know nothing about how advisable they are for video editing and capturing.Ideally, I’d like to go the Big Disk Extreme route for the speed later down the line, but am certainly open to suggestions on which way to go. Thanks ahead of time for any help!
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5 Replies
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I have daisy-chained my camera to the back of one of my LaCie hard drives and have had no major problems capturing or recording back to tape. I am currently running two LaCies as a RAID and have had no problems, and each drive is connected into its on firewire port on the back. I know this is probably not recommended by some, but it seems to serve my purposes well. Waiting for the price of a G5 to drop a little more, but looking at dual 2 processor in the next few months along with the big disk extremes. But I am waiting to make sure they don’t have any problems running under Tiger. Trying to forget the day I did the 10.3.9 update.
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I have daisy-chained my camera to the back of one of my LaCie hard drives and have had no major problems capturing or recording back to tape. I am currently running two LaCies as a RAID and have had no problems, and each drive is connected into its on firewire port on the back. I know this is probably not recommended by some, but it seems to serve my purposes well. Waiting for the price of a G5 to drop a little more, but looking at dual 2 processor in the next few months along with the big disk extremes. But I am waiting to make sure they don’t have any problems running under Tiger. Trying to forget the day I did the 10.3.9 update.
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I a pitch, or I should say when I too lazy to put in my FireWire PCI card into my laptop, I daisy chain a camera off the drives. I you are playing back a heavy edited timeline you will probably run into drop frames issues but it can be done and we have not hurt anything in the process.
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Sorry to disagree with FXbear and Sacci.
I had lots of trouble by daisychaining my FW drive and a camera.
On http://www.adamwilt.com you can find articles about this topic.
Main idea is that a daisychain takes the speed of the slowest device in the chain.
For FW drives this is 400mbit/sec
For FW800 (I suppose) it’s 800mbit/sec
BUT FOR MOST DV cameras this is 100mbit/sec WHICH IS TOO SLOW FOR YOU DRIVES.SO although it works on some setups it might as well not work!
FOr me the solution was to buy a FW PCI card. Connect the drives to that and connect the camera to the G4’s own FW bus.Also: on the G4 and G5 there are two (or more?) standard FW-ports, but THEY ARE ALL ON THE SAME BUS, so everything connected to them is actually daisychained.
I don’t know about the MacMini, can it handle PCI Cards? If yes, then that’s the wau to go.
If not than buy your disk if your upgrading in a short period anyway.
Try if it works and you might get lucky. But be carefull: Re-digitizing material that had dropframes during capture is like H#ll.RIenk
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Thank you all for the input. I think my plan at this point will be to buy a Lacie Extreme extrenal drive and use it for capturing when I capture the footage from a friend’s G5. Then I’ll empty out my old acom firewire/usb2 hard drive and use that for the dv25 editing. I’ll have to get something to dump off the stuff on the drive right now, but it seems like the wisest plan at this point.
Thanks again for the help!
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