I typically do what your describing, but I slightly partition the faster drive:

2GB partition at the end for the windows swap file. This will make your virtual memory as fast as possible. You have to config windows to ONLY use that drive for swap. You also don't have to worry about unmovable swap files from making your defrags of your data drive less optimized (cuz they won't be there).

13GB partition STRICTLY for capturing from DV tape. Basically I capture to this partition & then move the file to my data partition. This ensures that I can capture to a non fragmented partition & not have to worry about dropped frames. The extra time it takes me to capture & move is made up by not having to constantly defrag my data drive to minimize bad captures.

Finally a data partition for the rest of the drive.

Also, make sure the faster drive is the only device on that IDE cable (or the other devies on the cable are ATA66/100/133 devices. Slower drives like CDROMs can impede the performance of a fast drive, even on a fast controller.

- Jon

These are all good suggestions, but I am coming to the conclusion that a lot of these tweaks may not be all that critical any more. Five years ago, I had to do lots of things to make my K6-2 system capture without dropped frames; these days, hard drives are faster (sustained data transfer) by almost a factor of 10 and processors by a factor of at least 3. It would thus seem to me that you base your disk setup on other factors. For instance, you keep your system files on C: and your video files on a removable hard disk so you can pop in additional capacity easily as you need it.

Ahhh yes, this may be true, but if he owns a 5400 rpm HD, he may be the perfect candidate for such tweaks.

I just bought a Maxtor (40GB, 7200rpm, ATA 133) and dropped it in the Dell 2ghz P4. i'm using a basic, $50 Adaptec Firewire card. It's not partitioned. I use it for all the media assets (audio, stills, video captures, rendered movies from After effects, etc.). I guess I could put audio on my C: drive, would that help any? I've been giving it about a week of hard use (new to VV), and haven't seen a single dropped frame. =)

If I was seeing dropped frames I would likely just get another drive and stripe 'em together with some softRAID-like utility (more capacity can't hurt). It's easy on the Mac side, at least.

Any experience with a similar setup? I thought the above point sounded valid about faster HD & procs making such geek-tweaks unneccessary; maybe I just want to believe it.

Does anyone know what data rate VV requires for its proprietary DV codec? I seem to recall something like < 4mb/sec--well below ATA133 average throughput speeds. Other factors?

It's unbelievable the number of problems folks have with video applications even on Extremely fast machines. Sometimes Geak Tweaks are all you have left to try.
They don't take that long to work in, and every application benefits.
Vegas is a Professional tool, and one should configure their system as such. Don't you agree?

I just got a SIIG ATA 133 Raid controller card, I've got 2 100GB 7200RPM ATA 100 drives striped & it screams!

The card was only $58, and you don't have to disable any existing controllers you have. Why try slow software raid when you can get hardware raid so cheaply (it's only a little bit more than a reguar ata133 controller)

If you have 4 drives it'll do mirror & stripe for redundancy...

This bad boy ROCKS, and was super simple to setup.

- Jon

just curious, anyone use a firewire'd IDE drive (you know those IDE to firewire cases) as a capture drive?

DV is about 3.76MB/second. Even uncompressed AVI is only about 19MB/second. I've got an 866MHz P3 with 7200RPM drives on IDE 100. I almost never defragment (had my drives up to 35% fragmented) and i never drop frames when capturing or printing to tape. I would say that if you're having problems with dropped frames or jitter, it's probably not hardware, but much more likely to be other processes running on your computer. Just clicking the [Start] button will cause capture to drop half a dozen frames.

Thx for the info, Chienworks. I usually close all extraneous apps, and I can set the process priority to "high" or "realtime" for the capture app. Even without those steps I haven't had any problems. I would suspect that having 768mb of RAM helps--no swapping VM to disk there.

I can't get my Win XP to do the Start as High priority thing. I just get an error message about it not being set up to do so, and to go to the Folders control panel.
I went to folder options in Ctrl Panel, but nothing worked.

What do you have to do in XP to get that High priority feature to work?

Thanks

I have the Maxtor 80GB external Firewire, one of the old non-media (5400rpm ones), and i've had no problems with it. I've been able to capture to & print from it with no dropped frames.

Very nice indeed, and portable...

- Jon

I not only capture succesfully to an external firewire drive, but had no problems capturing with the camera plugged directly into the firewire drive's 2nd 1394 port insted of the card. Not sure I recommend that procedure, but it worked fine.

Wazungu:
Based on my observations, having all that RAM will help if you use the "Build dynamic RAM preview" command, but otherwise it won't be used by VV. On my W98 machine I have a slick little RAM monitor called "RamPage" running in the taskbar, and it shows how much RAM is in use at any moment. Running VV3 and about 40 background processes consumes only about 200MB out of the 256MB installed on my system. Any RAM beyond that 200MB is unused (at least on my machine).

>>>The card was only $58, and you don't have to disable any existing controllers you have. Why try slow software raid when you can get hardware raid so cheaply

those $58 RAID setups use a lot of CPU power too. I just tested mine, and copying a file uses a solid 20% (jumps up to 40% sometimes) CPU utilization on my Dual 1Ghz setup. that's like 400MHz worth. I'm using a Promise ATA100 RAID controller.

same test on a regular IDE drive uses about 13%-15% CPU.

same test on my SCSI drive uses 3% and I think that was for the pictures of the papers flying into the little folder in Explorer. :D

I guess SCSI RAID would have similar results... that's why it costs so much more...

>>>Based on my observations, having all that RAM will help if you use the "Build dynamic RAM preview" command, but otherwise it won't be used by VV.

that is true for the most part. when you get into using lots of high-res images in your timeline the RAM get's eaten up real fast. other than that you don't have to worry. I'd go for 512 on an XP system if it was just for Video.

Why do you say 512k if it was just for video? What other use would require more RAM. I'm currently spoecing a new VV3 machine and figured to put 1 gig of RAM in it but don't want to waste money if it's of little use.

>>>What other use would require more RAM

any type of 3d modeling, graphic design (Photoshop etc)...

basically anything where you are dealing with large amounts of data all AT ONCE will use RAM.

on the other hand, video is streamed off your hard drive. you only need to see one frame at one time for video to work. therefore RAM requirements are very low.

the time RAM comes into play in video work is when you want to store frames in RAM for fast playback (dynamic RAM previews). the more you got, the longer segments of video you can store in RAM. Vegas utilizes as much as you set in Options | Preferences | Video | Dynamic RAM. it is difficult to really utilize much more than a couple hundred MB, and that's why I recommend 512MB. it's plenty for video.

if you want proof just keep an eye on your task manager while you work on various applications. it will show you how much physical memory is free.

Thanks for the reply cheesehole, I appreciate it. I am tentatively planning on 1 gig of RAM, but only because I occasionally manipulate large Photoshop images - and as you astutely note, more RAM is better for these applications.

John Beech