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external hard drive video editing?
Hey. I will be editing video from my laoptop and i want to invest in a external hard drive. Is an external hardrive good for video editing? any issues?
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9 Replies
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ahhh….i feared as much. I plan on editing hdv on my laptop. Any recomendations to increase storage space….i mean since the external hard drive may slow me down:(
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Assuming you are referencing a Windows OS…
The external HD will only slow you down if the rate of data being sent to is is faster than the HD can process…
This means if you have a slow system then the bit rate to the HD will be slow and a slow HD will be… well,… slow.
On the otherhand, if your laptop is fast and your HD is fast… then the process will not be slowed down enough to be noticeable.
It is more of a matching of data transfer rate between the external HD and your laptop that generate the smoothest editing.
In my experience, the fact that you are using two seperate channels to process data (i.e., the computers HD and the external HD’s channels) the slow down caused by a external HD is not noticeable if your mobo is reasonably new (specially if it has at least 2-3 Gigs of RAM) and a dual processor or faster – or, as some would say… the laptop is expensive. For High Def Video… the min. required CPU processor speed is about 2.6 2X32 (dual processor), a GPU that has ram of about 512 and 2 Gigs of Ram with low latency values.
Joe
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THnks…Ur a big help:)
i also would like to know tho, with the new wireless N capabilities, Is it possible to edit video over it? As in have the assets(original video) on a drive on my desktop and access it from my laptop and thus do video editing? Is N capable of that?
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Don’t know since I don’t use an n wire HD system…
However, I currently use about 6 ext. HD’s and 4 internal HD type storage system to edit with… and, the last time I had some work done on my computer… my computer guy said I should look into the wireless HD system because it would be faster. I don’t know it that is true or not (or… he just wanted to sell me a wireless system)… but, according to my computer guy it would be faster than the standard 7200 ext. HD that I currently use.
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This whole discussion depends on what editing software you are using and your workflow. For example, if you are using Final Cut Pro (poster still has not said what his system and editing software is) it can dynamically adjust the video quality etc. to help performance. You can also do things like working with proxies until final render. You may want to consider working with proxies either way, because HDV is very processor intensive even though it has a low data rate (same as mini-DV).
As for wireless, HDV has a data rate of around 25MBps, that’s 25 megabytes per second. 802.11n wireless protocol has a peak throughput of 24MBps. Good luck actually getting that, especially with any consistency. This means that one stream of your HDV may make it ok (highly doubtful), but overall you will probably have a slow-going, chunky experience.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Since this is in an After Effects forum, should we assume you are working in After Effects? If so, real-time playback is not gonna happen anyway. Faster system, faster renders, but most newish laptops and hard-drives should be able to handle most renders. They make take hours, but they’ll get there.
If your talking about Final Cut, the short answer is yes. You should be able to edit. But like Brendan said, we don’t know what you’re running. I cut DVCProHD on my Macbook Pro with external FW800 drives all the time. HDV is a little clunky to edit with, so that may slow you down a bit.
More info on your set up would help us help you out.
greydogcreative.com
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I can;t speak much to this, but it might be worth looking into G-tech Drives.
https://www.g-technology.com/products/G-RAID-mini.cfmPeople at Adobe have told me that when they demo and edit on the road the G-Raid Mini drives have been pretty reliable, even for use in premiere which does need much faster throughput than AE. They also have an internal fan to keep them cool, which is pretty rare for a small portable drive.
I haven’t used them myself, but reviews and word on the street have been pretty good.
Their drives have many options, USB2, Firewire 400 and 800, and eSata.
But, as always, do your research before buying. Not the cheapest drives – that’s for sure.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
Im not sure about all the technical jargon but i edit on a Mac Mini and i started running low on space so I got a Maxtor 500 gb HD. Its workin great so far and i have HD footage on it too. Its been workin for me so just though i’d share.
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I agree with Aharon about a good quality hard drive. I learned a hard lesson by rendering to an external. I was doing a big project and the drive was spinning all the time and it wore out. One month after the warrantee ended.
Invest in a good drive, or render to the internal drive, and then move stuff to the external to make room for newer stuff.
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