• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Is a single Firewire drive fast enough?

  Posted by Tim Allison on February 11, 2008 at 5:35 pm

  I’m helping the local high school put together a Final Cut Pro editing system. One of the big problems with any student-access editing system is media drive storage space. One way around this is to require each student to have their own external Firewire drive. However, the “mini-RAID” 2-drive units are too expensive.

  Would a single Firewire drive be fast enough for HDV, DVCProHD, or ProRes 422?

  Russell Lasson replied 18 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

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  Jeff Carpenter

  February 11, 2008 at 6:48 pm

  HDV and DVCPRO HD…it’s probably just enough speed for those to work. They won’t get maximum real-time when applying effects, but they should be able to edit it.

  There are many sizes of ProRes, but I don’t think many (if any) of them will live too happily on a firewire drive.

  For all of these, getting a firewire 800 drive would help, assuming the computer has an 800 port.
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  Russell Lasson

  February 12, 2008 at 1:44 am

  As Jeff said, Firewire800 is the safe way to go for that. I’ve edited DVCPROHD over FW400 and it’s work pretty well, but Firewire800 gives some much needed bandwidth increases.

  You should be able to edit ProRES off of a FW800 drive, but it might end up being a little slow. If you go this way, you’ll see an improvement in speed if the external drive is a RAID 0 (two or more drives striped, not mirrored)

  -Russ

  Russell Lasson
  Kaleidoscope Pictures
  Provo, UT

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