Q. Questions about using my new Firewire drive

MNJ wrote on 5/10/2003, 4:38 PM

My PC has a 40Gig main drive, and a 60Gig drive I use only for video.

I bought a ADS Dual Link Drive and set it up as a Firwire drive, with a Western Digital 120G 8mb cache (total for both was $179 after rebates). I set it up this morning and it appears to work fine.

Question 1: As far as using it, am I suppose to turn it on before turning on the PC and later shut if off after turning off my PC? The instructions gave no clue about the order of things.

Question 2. The 60 Gig drive has been used alot during the year, at times full to 80%, and probably the files are fragmented. I was thinking about moving everything from the 60Gig drive to the external drive, then reformating the 60Gig. Is that good practice? Do other users find their Vegas workflow is better with an occasionally reformated drive?

Question 3. When capturing/editing/rendering, I was planning to only use the 60Gig, figuring it might be faster then the firewire drive. Is that correct, or does the firewire drive work just as well for those tasks.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/10/2003, 5:24 PM

1) I don't think it really matters, just so long as you have the drive connected and turned on before you try to use it. For example, if you open up a project that contains clips from that drive before the drive is on, then Vegas will get in a tizzy and ask you where the files are. This isn't fatal, but it can be annoying.

2) It wouldn't hurt. It's certainly a lot faster than defragging!

3) It shouldn't matter. Firewire is capable of 400Mbps and DV captures only require 30Mbps. The hard drive itself is capable of much faster data transfer. However, a few people have had some mostly inexplicable problems using the external drive. Try it and see what happens; if it works, then it works.

filmy wrote on 5/10/2003, 8:00 PM

If you are using Windows XP or Windows 98se I know the drive comes up when you turn it on and goes away when you turn it off. In other words it doesn't matter what order you turn the drive on or off in. One thing I would suggest is assigning a permanent drive letter for it that way you can turn it on and off and always have it come back in the same position.

Defraging drives in always a good thing when dealing with video. As for reformating I don't know if that would make a difference unless, if you are using XP, the drive is formated FAT32 and you want to re-format as NTFS. In that case dragging all files off that drive to the new drive is a must.

For me I have no problem with the capture to the firewire drive but playback is an issue at times. If you can deal with it, it is fine for editing, but I will render out to an internal drive and then create a new project with the rendered final edit and use that for output to tape. I have only had minor problems with the playback - some skipping, some weird digital garble and the occasional 'zap' where the screen goes blank (Total loss of signal in my case) and there are some sort of 'electric' lines for a few moments and than the picture comes back. I call these 'minor' because on this, and other products NLE forums, I read about people who have major problems like constant drop outs and constant blank screens or, in some cases, the drives don't work for video at all.

When I first got my furewire drive and put in onto the system I was freaked out at first when I captured and then started to edit and saw these little digital garble/glitches. I finally just dragged the files over to another drive and they were, in reality, perfect. So if you do a capture and then see something weird upon playback, before you panic drag the file over to an internal drive and see if it playback is the same or better. One other thing that I just found out a few days ago is that any firewire card you put in will come up as a network device, some people have found that when you go into your network settings and disable the 1394 card as a network card the problems clear up.

Also one other item that may help in some cases - there is a reg tweak that has to do with how the firewire drive is actually read. In case the link doesn't work for you just search the microsoft knowledge base for Article number 299598.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;299598

Hope some of this helps. :)

MNJ wrote on 5/11/2003, 10:07 AM

Filmy -

Thanks for all the good information. I haven't tried capturing or editing off the firewire yet, but I'll see what happens when I do.

I had my fw drive off, and with my PC running I turned on the fw drive and it showed up in Windows Explorer. (I have WinME)

kameronj wrote on 5/17/2003, 4:48 PM

here is my suggestion as for defrag or reformat of the drive...

I would just set up a defrag to run one night then go to bed.

It just seems like a few too many hoops to jump through (moving files to an external drive...reformat...repartition, etc ... moving files back). I would just set up a good defrag schedule once a month to run at 2 am and be done with it.

My goal is to let the 'puter do what it was designed to do (by itself) as much as possible when ever possible.

Just my advice.