Can you cut HDV on external Firewire Drive?

[Chris Babbitt]

No, in fact you will be better off, if you keep the media on your external drive.

[Dave Brandt]

Yes you can use an External Drive for HDV. Both USB and Firewire are adequate. It is only when you start using multicam features with 6 or more angles that you will find a bottleneck. For normal editing though it is fine.

Dave

[Keith Mcgregor]

Sure can but you’d better off using imac for receptionist
And get a real machine with an 800 port and always
Use externals as media drives.
-K

Reality? What did you make it?

[Zane Barker]

[Dave Brandt] “Both USB and Firewire are adequate”

WRONG, firewire is ok depending of the format of video, but USB is NOT.

USB works in bursts of data where firewire is a constant stream. Not having a constant stream of data will be vary problematic for video.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Dave Brandt]

It is true that Firewire and USB are using different architecture to control data flow, But as I said, Both are adequate. I have many years of experience using external drives for editing in final cut among others and I can say that USB will do the job just fine. I have edited multicamera shoots in HDV with a portable USB hard drive at 5400rpm. When it comes down to it the data rate of HDV is still only around 3.5MB/s

To answer the Original Posters Question if external drives are good enough for HDV I would still have to say YES!

Dave

[Zane Barker]

[Dave Brandt] “I have edited multicamera shoots in HDV with a portable USB hard drive at 5400rpm”

Just because you have had fair luck with them does not mean that they are recommended for good video editing performance by any means.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!