[Pierre Delafontaine]

Actually, I strongly suspected that modern machines, with their fast drives and buses, had made that video file separation unnecessary.

However, considering that only 7.5 years separate my mid-2002 PowerMac G4 and its PATA drives from my newly acquired early-2008 Mac Pro and its SATA drives, I was indeed wondering whether those 7 years had really made a difference regarding the need to separate video files as it was recommended to do back then.

So, thanks Ben and all who responded. 🙂

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Makes sense, yes, especially that my G4 is only FW 400! ☹

So I think I’ll do that: transfer the original DV footage to the SSD, as it may speed up rendering of any effects, image corrections, text additions and things like that, and I’ll use the 1 TB HD for renders, which will always be used “as is”.

Thanks Devrim and Jeremy! 😊

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Well, if you’re talking original DV footage for that project, it’s only the 3 DV 1-hour source tapes, which is about 40 GB.

FW would be a convenient way to load them onto the Mac Pro’s SSD, unless going through my NAS using the 1Gb Ethernet link would be faster. But that would require uploading from G4 to NAS and then downloading from NAS to Mac Pro, which might very well offset the potential time-saving…

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Devrim,

Thanks. 🙂 No, no heavy effects needed other than in the opening sequence. Some image quality correction and simple text overlays here and there. Other than that, it’s just DV moved all the way to the left of the frame, leaving the 2 pillar boxes combined to the right for comments and maps on the black background.

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Jeremy,

You’re quite right. I’ve already noticed that on the G4: the HD I use for renders is filling up quite fast and I probably would have had to add my fourth HD as a render disk.

However, now that I have the Mac Pro, the 1To SATA HD is almost empty, which makes it a prime destination for renders as well as for the export of the final movie once I’ve completed the editing.

On a side note, what about connecting my existing G4 to my Mac Pro using a Firewire cable and booting the G4 in Target Mode? If I am not mistaken, that would allow me to access the source files currently stored on the G4 and continue editing my movie on the Mac Pro.

Roughly the same FCP setup (with a few adjustments regarding the drives used), but FCP would run on the 2 faster Xeon processors and with 16 GB of RAM, which I believe is enough for basic 1920x1080i HD and should therefore boost editing speed.

The idea being that accessing the source files on the G4 via FW would obviously take longer than having them on the SSD, but once the clips loaded in the Mac Pro RAM, processing would be faster…

What do you think?

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Jeremy,

The boot drive is the SSD, which is a 120 GB SSD, and not a 320 GB SSD as I incorrectly wrote in my initial post.

In light of what Devrim said, considering that the SSD has 99 GB free and I don’t plan to install much of anything on it apart from Final Cut Studio 5.1, there should be ample space left on the SSD to accomodate my 3 hours of DV source files, which is about 40 GB total.

[Pierre Delafontaine]

Many thanks, Devrim, that’s pretty much what I thought and I’ll keep that in mind. 🙂