Purchase advice for FCP5 / Pipe Studio / LaCie External Drives

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bud Cooper] “1. We are looking at raided LaCie HD Extreme Triple Interface 250GB drives as primary for editing and storage. Are we looking at the right drives? I have used them quite successfully with compressed footage but I have no experience with uncompressed and am not sure if these drives will do the trick.”

What does LaCie say? I’ve run the Big Disk Extreme here with 8bit SD uncompressed footage with no issues whatsoever. Very solid product that has performed well over the past year or so. LaCie’s specs will tell you if the drive is rated for uncompressed SD work.

[Bud Cooper] ”
2. 2GB Ram enough? My IT guys say I should get more but our G4 is running fine with 1GB.”

I would get 4GB minimum. FCP can take advantage of up to 2GB RAM so give yourself plenty of overhead for the OS and any other apps you may want to run with FCP.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

G5 Dual 2.0, AJA Kona 2, Medea FCR2X

[Rennie Klymyk]

I’m looking at the FirmTek external system mainly because my AJA i/o doesn’t like to share the firewire bus but it still looks like a great storeage system for the mac. PCI/PCIX card with up to 4 SATA outs; Hot swap drive enclosures (2 drives ea.) jbod or raid 0, 3 configurable. Drive cradles are $22.00 so you can keep drives on the shelf to hot swap or just change if you want to start something new before you have to dump your present data. The cables are only a meter long so the drives need to be close to your computer but this system is not that expensive. I have seen 2 meter cables elsewhere but Firmtek doesn’t mention this length. They offer a bundle with the card and cables etc all in one which is great too. The whole system is less than a fibre channel card (less drives) and with drives getting bigger and cheaper by the day it is versitile too.
More info:
FirmTek

[Kevin Monahan]

I think an external SATA RAID is an excellent platform for the Pipe.

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com