HDV over USB External Drive?

xjerx wrote on 7/10/2007, 9:50 AM

I'm working on a project with 26 hours of HDV footage at 1080/24f from a XH-A1. Will be working with DV proxies..but the project will have many many layers and graphics and effects and will need to be rendered from the original HDV files to a final HDV file. Can all this be done with a USB external drive...or should I just stop my bellyaching and buy a firewire 400 drive?

thanks
jeremiah

Comments

fausseplanete wrote on 7/10/2007, 3:48 PM

I have found the GRAID2 drive good, though I have not yet encountered projects of the complexity you describe (mostly my projects are 1 or 2 HDV tracks with one or two SD tracks). It has both USB and FW interfaces, the latter in the form of -400 or -800 (your machine needs an FW-800 interface to benefit from that). The manufacturers claim that with a FW-800 port it will for example cater for 4 HDV streams or 7 DV streams. Alternatively I guess (without knowing for sure) that you could get similar or greater benefits by spreading your source media across more than one ordinary (non-RAID) drive (ie separate files on separate drives). It may however be a nuisance to connect it all up and ensure drive letters have not changed. Also in its favour, the GRAID drive incorporates a fan, helping it stay reliable. Nevertheless I also maintain a mirror copy of its contents on a standard cheaper external drive...

Laurence wrote on 7/10/2007, 6:54 PM

I just had a similar discussion a about using an external USB drive for Cineform codec based HDV projects on another forum. The consensus there was that as long as the drive is USB2 and 72000 RPM, you can do a typical project with two streams of video just fine. A proxy based project would be even easier on the hard drives.

I just bought two 500 gigabyte USB2 Western Digital Mybooks. I bought them for only $129 each. They are working spectacularly well. I can see no performance difference between the new USB2 drives I'm currently using and the Firewire 400 drives I've used in the past.