OT: Firewire 800 Drive and laptop vid capture

PH125 wrote on 8/18/2005, 2:16 PM

I recently got an HP notebook that I spec'd for video editing. It has a Pentium 4 650, 2 GB DDR2 Ram, but only a 5400 RPM HD (100GB). I would have rather gotten a 7200RPM HD, but HP didn't have any available at the time I purchased so I had to settle.

Regarding that I have a few questions...

1. Will I run into problems while editing/capturing video w/ a 5400RPM HD?

2. As far as Firewire 800, would it serve as an alternative to get a PCMCIA 1394b card and a firewire 800 compatible 7200RPM external HD, and then set that as the capture destination for video? Or would this make no difference if it has to first be routed through to the main HD first, which is of course slower.

3. As far as notebooks go, will I really see a significant difference w/ editing (video retrieval, render times) while using firewire 800 as opposed to firewire 400 or USB 2.0?

I'm going to college in a week so I need to make a decision fast. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.

Comments

farss wrote on 8/18/2005, 2:44 PM

You can capture OK to a 5400 RPM drive but only just. Also the internal drives are pretty small on laptops. We regularly capture using a laptop with an external firewire 400 drive housing with a 7200 RPM drive. However again it only just does the job, if you try to resize a window while the PC is capturing frames get dropped. This is a pretty slow laptop though (900MHz PIII).
If you can afford it I'd get a LaCie firewire 800 box of 500GB or 1000GB, these boxes have mulitple drives in RAID 0 which speeds things up quite a bit. Even so firewire 800 is slower than IDE or SATA interfaces, certainly on my monster PC render times are much slower coming from any firewire drive compared to internal drives.
Bob.

ScottW wrote on 8/18/2005, 3:39 PM

Bob, your problems capturing are more likely an issue with your seriously underpowered PC than the 5400 RPM drive. I've catpured many hours of TV programming via an ADVC 300 to my laptop with its 5400 rpm drive and never had a dropped frame, even while doing other things, like opening a file explorer window.

--Scott

Jay_Mitchell wrote on 8/19/2005, 2:16 AM

If your budget allows - you could purchase a 7200 RPM laptop drive and a EZ-Gig external enclosure. The EZ-Gig software will allow you to ghost transfer the entire drive and OS onto the new drive. Then, just put your 5400 drive into the case and use it as a capture drive, or for whatever you wish.

When I upgraded my laptop's 5400 drive to a 7200 drive - it made a huge difference in performance.

Jay Mitchell
SCVUG.com

farss wrote on 8/19/2005, 8:44 AM

You're right, I've captures to the internal drive with the same results . The issue for me isn't so much drive speed as capacity, we capture 10 -12 hours per 'shift'. Also the internal drives are FAT32, the pain, the pain!
What we do is post capture, move the drives to a monster machine for editing / encoding, we can churn out around 20 DVDs / day this way.
Bob.

apit34356 wrote on 8/19/2005, 10:12 AM

The 7200rpm drive will increase performance but expect a greater demand on the battery and a lot more heat being generated which may over taxi your cooling system. Additional cooling should be looked into. A side note about drive noise, the 5400's are pretty quiet, but some 7200 drives are extremely noisy, a factor to be considered in a live recording app.

DCV wrote on 8/19/2005, 10:51 AM

I'm currently using a HP zd7000 laptop (3.2Ghz Northwood, 2GB DDR, 60Gig 7200RPM) with a Firewire 800 Cardbus Adapter hooked to 3 Wiebtech Fire800 enclosures (2 -WD 250s, Maxtor 300).

1 - 2) You will have no problems capturing to your internal HD. An external Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 would suffice as well. No need to implement Firewire 800 for capturing. The other protocols are fast enough to handle it.

3) But, Firewire 800 is the only way to fly for external drives for editing. It's low CPU utilization and speed kill USB 2.0 and Firewire 400.

I'm slightly concerned though over the introduction of hardware based Firewire 800 RAID 0 enclosures for video work. Sure they're fast and all, but you're also looking at twice the chance of losing your data. If one drive fails, it's all gone. Better have a good backup protocol in place.

John

farss wrote on 8/19/2005, 3:38 PM

RAID 0 got a lot of bad press, even I got caught out big time with it and certainly if a drive fails you're really dead. However in my and I'm certain many other cases the issue wasn't that the drive had failed.
The driver had a glitch and the result was loss of the entire RAID 0 drive.
I'm since using SATA RAID 0 off a Highpoint controller and not a hint of trouble and the thing screams along. We've got a LaCie 1GB f/wire 800 box with 4 drives in it and despite being moved all over the place again not a hint of problems although it is noisy.
Bob.