Thanks G! Any particular reason why?

T

2 basic reseaons:

1. Capturing and rendering pure DV is a very greedy process! You could end up with your system drive being "swamped" AND not have enough left to operate.

2. Its a good idea to have your system drive doing what it does best - drive your system.

G

Appreciate it G!! Have a nice weekend.

Hi -

Just when I thought I was beginning to catch on to this stuff...

If I read things correctly - Teepolo asked if one should put the A/V on the same drive as the OS, and Grazie responded in the affirmative and then it sounded like his explanation was saying it's better to have them on separate drives.

I had wondered the same thing before, too.
Please realize I'm not flaming anyone, I just don't understand the question/answer.

Help!

Teepolo said, "Is it better to capture your audio and video on a seperate hard drive that has the operating system on it? " Answer IMHO - YES. Ronbo the clue here is "separate" - yeah? Sooooo . . . if I replied in the "affirmative" - uh, in silly olde Enland we put up with "Yes" - yeah? Sooooo . . . 2 drives. One for capturing video AND one "separate" hard drive that has the system drive.

Flaming - nah! Sometimes Friday is too long for some of us - it's been a long week for me, anyway.

Ronbo have a truly nice weekend ;-)

Grazie

Ah-ha! Thanks for the clarification, Grazie. And as always, I listen very closely when you type something. You, and a few of the other regulars, are crutial to us bumblers (well, me anyways).

I think I got lost when "separate" and "that was for" were in the same sentence. "THAN was for" would have made more sense to me (although I'm sure my old (and I do mean old) English-Grammar teacher would have smacked me on the head (again) no matter what I thought).

Again, thanks. And thanks for all the help.

;-})

Nah problemos - Grandma was nefer my string pint! . . .

If I can help I'll try . . I've only been in this DV-NLE stuff for 'bout 18 months -Love film and video so . . . making it all stretch a bit further with VV.

Grazie

Hey Ronbo. I asked if it was better to capture your video on a seperate drive than the drive that contains the OS. I,m having problems with VV3 starting up and i have been receiving a wealth of information form the forum. In one of the replys to my other questions it was mentioned to me to seperate the OS drive from the rendering. Probably a performance issue. Do you currently have two drive running?

Is the drive a 7200RPM drive? That's a must. I have a 40GB with OS + Programs and two other drives...an 80 and a 120. I put video on those.

Download Sisoft Sandra and run a drives benchmark. It gives comparisons with other drives. Find the closest one to yours and see how far off it is. The numbers are extremely inaccurate in a real world sense, but as a comparitor with other drives done with the same benchmark test it is useful. What you are looking to see is if your drive is MUCH slower than the closest drive in the list which matches yours.
I'm talking MUCH MUCH slower. If it is you may have it set up wrong.

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/

You may also want to use either the manufacturer's utility disk for the drive or Scandisk to run a sector test on it. There is probably nothing wrong with the drive though.

As an alternative you can try Partition Magic and put your OS and programs on the Primary partition and set up a logical partition for your video files. I believe you can download a trial version, but read the directions carefully before you do it and back up anything important onto a CD first.

http://www.powerquest.com/

John

Yes, you should, but you don't necessarily have to with Vegas.

My laptop editor is 1 gig proc, 512 ram and a whopping 4200 rpm (40 gig) drive. Not partitioned, the only drive, ACPI enabled and despite all of that, it still works flawlessly.

Ok, y'all. Now this is going to jinx me for sure when I brag that everything works fine.

I have a Sony laptop (I think it's about a 1.1G Athlon) with a 20G harddrive (separated by factory into 6G and 14G partitions). I also have an outboard 120G WD Firewire drive. Don't know the speed of any of them, but I doubt they're more than the standard 5400's. And everything works perfectly together, never had a hardware problem that wasn't ... ummmm... humanly-created.

Capture, edit, render, etc, everything has been very good. I suppose I'd always be impatient for the final results no matter what the speeds of any of the hardware, but like I said, never a clash orproblem. That is, once I got out my byte-broom and removed the last vestiges of P*nn*cle and Pr*mi*re. Never positive what the issues were, but it seemed like I'd have these weird intermittent bugs that weren't easily reproducable from one time to another. Like maybe I'd close VV3, and the next day it would lock up or something... but not the next time I tried it by going thru the same steps. Once I deleted all other editing stuff, it has been slick. been slick been slick been slick been slick been slick...
oh darn!

As far as what's on where, I've been using the little 6G drive for all the program files (VV as well as other stuff like Office, Palm, etc) and either the bigger 14G internal drive for data (small VV jobs) or just dump 'em over to the big 120. Never a clash or crash. Have had everything on the 6/14 when I started, but didn't notice any problems then either. I moved 'em to simply get more room.

Sorry Teepolo, I had read your initial post and Grazie's answer wrong. I'd understood the answer to contradict the postulated question/answer. Wish I could be of more assistance as to what's what on the inside, but all I can offer is my anecdotal experience. I'm sure some of the much more knowledgeable folk here are more help.

;-})

Here is part of the problem:

"Quick question. Is it better to capture your audio and video on a seperate hard drive that has the operating system on it? Have a great weekend. "

and:

"Hey Ronbo. I asked if it was better to capture your video on a seperate drive than the drive that contains the OS. I,m having problems with VV3 starting up and i have been receiving a wealth of information form the forum. In one of the replys to my other questions it was mentioned to me to seperate the OS drive from the rendering. Probably a performance issue. Do you currently have two drive running? "

You aren't decribing your problem. Instead you are asking general questions about drives and partitions and how the rest of us like them set up. Maybe the problem lies elsewhere. "I'm having problems with VV3 staring up" to me means that the program won't load. Did I guess correctly? Please give some details.

John

Hi y'll! First up - apologies for the long-winded deconsrtuction that follows. PLease feel free to counter my suggestions below . . . .

Craftech - Yup, that's the one! UK here and I've slept on what was said . . Hmmmm.... Having a specific problem AND having a solution to that problem is SPECIFIC - yes? Agreed. Right. . . IF there is a specific problem then maybe this can be solved here - clashes in s/w, not enough space on drive etc etc. BUT, just becasue Ronboc hasn't had a specific problem - oh, apart from the time VV didn't start up - why should Ronboc think having separate drives would be advantageous? Ageed? Soooo . . . NOT having a problem would also make me think too that a solution [ two drives or not ] would not be needed - yeah?

Ronboc has "reduced" the NLE s/w to just VV - fine. That's to provide a clear platform for VV. So, Ronboc's "solution" would appear to have a succesful claim that this is "the way" to go. However, there are others on this Forum who still have the NLE s/w he speaks of still residing on their systems, and they don't "appear" to have a problem. I do understand what Ronboc is now saying, and says as much, "but all I can offer is my anecdotal experience." AND that experience has been good. Now I can understand R's questionning the reasons why there may have been a misunderstanding. And YES there is value in deconstructing this "logic". The reason for this, for me, is that because a "problem" doesn't appear then that "platform" IS the correct way to go - why do anything other than this? Within this lies the RUB.

Okay - There is no ONE "solution" to a given "problem". Many apparent solutions can "hide" a symptom. I'm no progammer, but I believe these types of solutions are called "work-arounds". Consequently, these "work-round" solution/s may not actually cure the inherent problem. For example, I've had to employ Fangui, a piece of freeware - from Mr Dieffer thank you and RESPECT! - s/w that keeps my fan/s going so that any call made on the Dell Inspiron cooling system through the BIOS will not trip up the flow of DV through the firewire - GO figure that one! - So what I've employed is an interim "cure" [Fangui] it does not "resolve" the underlying "problem" - the callout to the fan/s to switch on and off. How does Fangui do this? It does this by keeping/forcing the fan/s to remain on, constantly. I offer this as an example of a "solution" not solving a "problem". Now in much the same way, IMHO, that Ronboc's quizzing my replies as to not appreciating the "potential" need for having a separate video capture drive. Why do this? Ronboc doesn't have a problem - why should others have a problem? Wellllll . . . I use firewire 7200rpm drives to do VF and VV sessions. I don't just use them for "dumping" large files for storage [ Ronboc - do you just use your external for storage and your 14/6 drive for editing? ]

My conclusions are that having 14gig for creating DV-NLE work would work for small projects - done it myself, with the small space I used to have on my onboard drive. But, once I got beyond the say 5min and more than one project, I really needed to consider having fast 7200rpm drives. That's what I have now. Call me greedy, but I now employ 2x 120gb; 1x80gb and 1x60gb firewire 7200rpm MAXTORS. My system onboard drive does not thrash about and quietly gets on with the process of being a system drive while my externals work together throwing large lumps of DV and graphics for the purposes of creating VV and VF projects. As long as Fangui "holds the line" while I'm PTTing, it works!

I do hope what I've written has been of assistance - It's helped me!

Apologies if you have come this far and found it of no value, but I think others may have benefitted.

Cheers

Grazie

Okay, I'll pile on too. Five years ago, it made a very big difference to make sure you did everything just right in order to avoid dropped frames. Today, processors and drives are 10X faster. As our laptop bretheren indicate, even crummy little laptop drives can now do the job. The big thing having separate drives gets you is the ability to swap drives for multiple projects. I myself have 5 hard drives in their little plastic cases that I can plug into the PC on a moment's notice.

What happenned to Teepole (I think is was he)in a previous thread was that he captured his hard drive totally full and then the problems started. Windows
applications cannot operate on a totally full hard drive and some files probably
got roached out. You would have to set about a 500meg safety net (options) to keep the drive from being totally filled up and choking off windows apps.
Win2k and XP have a hard enough time existing in a pristene environment and if you choke them off during an operation your in big doo-doo. Bill does not allow for
big doo-doo operations.

James J. Kizak

Might as well weigh in here too...

First off I'll use a real world example but a bit off topic: My brother in law runs win XP on a system with a Pentium 300! (his wife has the nice game system). Does it run, yeah... Is it anything I would consider doing? Absolutely not.

Hard drive stuff is the same thing. A 10000 rpm drive is faster then a 7200 is faster then a 5400 and so on. All work. Raid0 is faster then an individual drive.

Running windows, you have a whole bunch of stuff (programs &/or services & processes) running behind the scenes. In win2k or XP go to the task mgr (ctrl + alt + delete) to see a big list. In win98SE check the system information utility in windows. Windows also uses a swap or page file to store all the stuff it needs to remember and can't fit into memory. Most of the running services & apps & processes access the disk from time to time, and running something like Vegas (or most any program) causes windows to write data to it's on disk storage file (pagefile.sys or win386.swp etc.).

An individual drive can only go so fast, do so much -- the same for the ide channel that hooks up to the drive. It's long been known (since win 3.1) that if you move your swap file off the physical drive hosting windows, your system will perform a bit faster since you're giving the system drive less to do. How much faster depends on your system but this is something done by gamers seeking the absolute top fps.

When you record or play back large media files, having those on a separate physical disk, and preferably separate ide channel, the drive doesn't have to worry about reading/writing anything else - it's not reading Vegas code from the swap file (or anything else) on that drive at the same time it's reading/writing the media files.

Will stuff work if all you've got is a single drive? Usually. The exceptions that come to mind are capturing analog audio &/or video. Many digital capture routines allow the data to be transferred at your system's speed - it works like the overburn protection on your CDRW - slowing down or speeding up data flow. Capture uncompressed audio at 48 or better combined with uncompressed full size video & you likely will have problems using the system drive. [I use uncompressed in the example because then your CPU horsepower has little to do with anything - it's more a pure function of how fast data can get onto the drive.]

Will video/audio editing move faster if you have separate physical drives? Usually, depending on how everything's set up, including the motherboard. When you render a file, rendering the output to another drive on another channel will normally speed things up quite a bit since as above you're only asking one drive to write, & one to read.

I recently replaced one of my drives with a 60 gig and ran some tests to figure out the best way to route it. I have one hard drive on each of the motherboard's 2 ide channels, & one using a Maxtor ide card. Timeing the transfer of a 600+ meg file back and forth I found that was the fastest setup - otherwise using one of the ide channels (or using 2 channels on the card) to do double duty cost time. Your mileage will vary so check it out yourself.

At any rate, I can render a video to the same drive containing the source, or I can see-saw between 2 non-system drives. Over the course of most any project, going back and forth between the drives when rendering saves at least half an hour, often more. Again, check it out yourself.

It will work either way, would work if I just used the system drive, which I do use for overflow now. If I was building a system and/or adding a drive or drives, I would set it up with a smaller 7200 rpm drive as system drive, then a couple of 60's rather then a 120 - or a couple of 120's etc. if I had the cash.

all for now - gotta watch the news re: the shuttle

mike

I cannot agree that it is a *must* to use 7200rpm, although I would use one, if I have to buy a new one. Well, I am new to this forum and I am waiting for the delivery of VV, so I have experiences with other programs and the demo only, but I never had problems with partitions on a 80GB ST380021A@5400rpm via 100Mbit Ethernet (Samba-Server) and even an old 4GB drive could be used for capturing without any problems. IMO the critical thing is capturing. I also captured from a client to the hd on the samba-server, while a file in another partition of the hd was encoded. Is there another argument than 0 frames lost?

All-

Forgive me here for perhaps being a tad touchy today, but I live in the Dallas TX USA area and felt the sonic-booms and saw the flame/smoke plumes as the late Columbia careened overhead on its way to eternity this morning. I had to conduct some unrelated-business this afternoon in what the news-media is calling the 'debris-field' and had a difficult time with it all. I have been in a funk all day. Though I have no personal ties to the crew, it was a very sad day and I feel for their relatives/friends.

Grazie, perhaps I misunderstood your recent post, but " why should Ronboc think having separate drives would be advantageous? Ageed? Soooo . . . " was maybe a different interpretation than was intended. All I was trying to offer was that it seemed to work for me, based on my configuration. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't believe I said one configuration was more advantageous than another. Others can dissect or ignore what works or doesn't as they may, as I'm sure they're much more versed regarding pc's and hardware and software (VV or otherwise) than I am. I do not even begin to profess to understand all the ramifications (and have said so on this forum), but in fact feel very proud to even be able to contribute my small share to the greater consciousness. I know I certainly owe a great debt to you, Grazie, and the many others to whom I have learned from in the time I have been participating. I was offering what I could in partial-repayment.

I weighed into the original discussion simply because I didn’t understand the answer to the original question. Based on subsequent discussion, it is now clear to me that Teepolo’s original question (post #1, on 31 Jan, at 11:05am) pivoted around the word THAT and his re-phrasing of the question (his post #4, on 31 Jan, at 5:23pm) used the word THAN, being two very different things. If that was the original intent, okey-dokey. I was trying to clarify it in my mind.

Again, my apologies if I misinterpreted anything I said or misunderstood anything anyone else said.

Ronbo

Hello Ronboc - In the UK, I, my friends & family were shocked and horrified on seeing the dreadful scenes of the loss of those young lives in the destruction of the Shuttle.

In such circumstances, IMHO, it seems of little relevance in continuing this "separate drive" thread - No need for apologies Ronboc. I too have learnt a lot from this particular "thread" discussion and your feedback - thank you. I am no technical boffin or programmer, just wanting to provide any form of feedback to our colleagues, here on the Vegas Forum, on issues that I may have gleaned some experiential "knowledge".

Ronboc - Bygones!

Please, if you choose to, have a restful weekend - I can imagine that presently in Texas it must be quite a reflective time - for all concerned.

My very best regards,

Grazie

I agree. Shake on it?

Grazie, I've noticed from some of your other posts that you have an interest in the culinary arts as well. Should you ever find yourself traveling to the US, I extend to you an offer for some genuine Texas-style smoked-brisket. It would be my honor.

;-})

Hey, can I get in on that, too? I, too, have culinary skills--I am quite accomplished at boiling water, and also at heating up pizza. When I really want to impress, I make spaghetti.

Absolutely! "Shake on it?" PUT IT THERE - PARdNER !!!!

Hmmmm . . smoked brisket sounds truly divine. What do you eat with it? What veggies? Vegas Style Veggie Grits? - Or . . . . what?

Now, if you ever get to London - wellllllll . . .. Fish 'n Chips out of Newspaper after a few bottles of Guinnes or Stout! OR - A superb lunch at Lords Cricket ground watching England getting thrashed by the Aussies - again . . . Failling that, it would be a short trip to the English countryside to have a Pub Lunch of Steak 'n Kidney Pudding washed down with some . . . . let me see . . . . THeakstons Bitter Beer or "John Smiths" . . . . interested? Just been out today - took Mum and Dad to just such a place. I had Bubble 'n Squeak and Cumberland sausage on a ed of the creamiest mash potato, in rich gravy!

Sorry folks . . . got carried away with myself.

I've just done a test using Grob's remedy for Fangui - thread here - and it appears to be holding.

Anyways - Let's enjoy our lives and celebrate what's left - eh?

Grazie