V V and Partitions

mgaston wrote on 11/12/2002, 9:54 AM
I have seen the light with digital video, and it is partitions.

Don't know about anybody else's experience with V V 3.0c and Win XP, but I was never able to get it to work reliably (it crashes periodically with an Exception error.) No one seems to have an answer to this, so I solved it by creating a new partition on the boot drive with Partition Magic, and installing Win 2000 there. Now it works perfectly.

Truth is, most boot drives these days have plenty of room for other partitions, and also, new versions of software--i.e. Vegas 4.0--may not be entirely stable when they are first released. If you put 'em in a different partition, with a new copy of the OS, it makes no difference. It can crash the entire system, and you can still boot to the other OS.

Windows inevitably goes bad after about a year anyway, in my experience. If you've got another copy to boot to, it makes living the Microsoft experience a lot less painful.

Also, it may even be true that disk access for video files happens faster with smaller partitions; seems like it does (but a computer expert will have to weigh in on that.)

Anyway, my two cents....

Comments

Summersond wrote on 11/12/2002, 12:48 PM
One thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that you can have several partitions on a hard drive, but depending on the speed of the PC, you may develop a performance hit on a slower one if you try to do too many things at once. An example of this: Say you have a 80GB hard drive and want to create a partition for the data to reside on. When you need to access both partitions for data or program material at the same time, there will be a bottleneck because the drive can only seek a single request at a time. Normally, this will not be a problem, but if you were capturing video, or writing video at that time, it could cause a dropout. If you can afford it, you really should have a 2nd hard drive on a second controller, so they will operate totally independently, therefore removing the bottleneck issue. One other issue is that if the single hard drive is partitioned and any of the partitions get fragmented much, (and they will with data files and projects) that will only further aggrevate the problem of dropouts and slower response. For fastest file access, one can "tailor" the sector size of the partition for better performance using a 3rd party utility like Partition Magic. Since most video files are usually huge, setting the sector size to a larger number will speed read and write access to the file because of the heads not having to go to the hard drive directory(FAT)as much to seek the location of the next part of the file it is accessing. It is NOT for small files, as you will get a lot more wasted space (I.E. a 12k file put in a 32k sector still uses 32k, a 20k waste). Also, Microsoft says that it doesn't support sector sizes other than it's default for backup. Personally, I have left mine alone and get along fine. I have a Dell 2.4 GHZ P4 and 2-80GB drives (on separate controllers) and get along great. I am running XP Pro and have had NO problems with the OS and VV3c. You never said which version of XP you were using. Pro is $100 more, but I feel it is well worth it for the added things I get with it.

Sorry to hear that you have had so much bad luck with XP and VV3. It is a wonderful combination.

Dave