Lost Clip / What External Hard Drive?

MarkCambridgeEngland wrote on 10/3/2006, 3:34 AM

Dear all

I have a 160Gb hardrive on my Sony Vaio. Its partitioned such that all operating software and 'My Documents' are written in the smaller 20Gb partition. The larger partition is set aside for video work.

I have the the Platignum edition of this software and have finally finished editing my movie, rendered it and then created DVD in Architect.

Unfortunately, I couldnt do Architect DVD as there was not enough disc space. I had to remove all original movie clips first. In the process I lost one of clips when I dropped it accidentally in waste bin. Due to large sixe - XP deleted it instantly - Not recoverable. All others were backed up on DVDs.

I decided it wouldnt be a problem as the rendered project was waiting to go into DVD creation software. A few hours of messing around and the DVD was finished. THEN after burning several discs discovered an error in the text of the credits and need to go back and reacapture clip somehow and put it all back together. Aghhhhh.

Anyway - I am fed up having to take big files on off my PC which clearlly has insuficient space. Before I try and redo the project - I dont want to lose the 14Gb rendered project - and want to keep it as a backup.

My question is what should i be using for video editing? I have firewire ports and I believe these are quick.

I was told by a company to get G-Tech G-Raid drives - A 500Gb drive costs around £259 + VAT from Jigsaw24.com.

Your advice would be most welcome

Cheers

Mark

Comments

gmes29 wrote on 10/3/2006, 6:14 AM

i can recommend the Iomega 500gb external drive. very solid, well built. just plugs right into the USB port.. got mine for ~$270..

Strangeman wrote on 10/3/2006, 6:19 AM

I wonder whether you're falling foul of the fact that most software defaults to storing files in c:\my documents or similar.

I have a completely separate partition on my system, which I call 'temp', and every time I install new software, I go through the preferences (or equivalent) and force the software to use a directory on this partition for any temp, scratch, rendering or whatever.

I also store any project files/documents completely away from the o/s partition (there is a tweak you can do to make 'my documents' go somewhere else apart from the c: drive, but I haven't got around to trying this yet) that way, if you ever have a problem with windows, you won't lose all your documents.

By my reckoning 120Gb is enough for roughly 10 hrs of video in .AVI format. In my experience bigger drives just equate to bigger problems when they fill up or go wrong.