EXTERNAL FIREWIRE DRIVES FOR VIDEO CAPTURE

kcarroll wrote on 5/23/2002, 10:55 AM
I have been using a 80gig Maxtor firewire drive for Video Capture, and things seem to work well. Recently, I have spoken to several people using other application software who have been of the the opinion that Firewire drives were either unusable or unreliable in this capacity.

Is Video Factory that much better at what it does, or have I been lucky?

kcarroll

Comments

Grazie wrote on 5/23/2002, 11:49 AM
I've got an external 60gb Maxtor Firewire drive. It works puuuurrfectly with VF and bearly complains at the demands I make of it - lots of file retreivals and copying going on with DV-NLE work. The only complaint I've got is an unresearched defrag issue on my WinME OS, when defragging the Maxtor drive. I leave the defrag to go ahead and when I return the laptop has switched itself off! Maybe it lost interest and the will to live. Hey ho! However the defrag on my C: on board drive is not a problem.

Grazie
JodoKast wrote on 5/23/2002, 12:15 PM
The only downside I've heard of on the external FireWire drives, is that although they are rated at 7200 RPM, they actually run a bit slower to cut down on the noise. I suppose that is why some people may have problems capturing to them (dropped frames, etc.?).
Grazie wrote on 5/23/2002, 12:52 PM
JodoKast - Nope haven't had dropped frames. Clean captures over here. There is a "burst" memory facility going on in the background to assist the demands of DV work.

Grazie
miketree wrote on 5/24/2002, 3:22 AM
Grazie

could you please explain that last comment.
Grazie wrote on 5/24/2002, 4:40 AM
Miketree

The drive is a Maxtor 60gb 7,200rpm ATA/100 IDE with 2mb cache buffer – I re-read the specification. It was the “cache buffer” I was referring to as “burst”. I suppose that is was helps my DV editing write and read to the Maxtor – that’s all. However thanks for making me re-look.

Grazie