Is firewire 800 fast enough?

[lonely leap]

Hello. My burning question is simple...Is firewire 800 Fast enough to edit Hvx200 720p footage with? Thats it basically.

We have everything backed up on 8 250 gig LAcie drives which we use in the field but now wev want to edit from one location in FCP 5.1.2 wth 2.5 ghz Mac Pro Xeon. The cheap option is to go with firewire 800 drives maybe daisy chaining lots of 250 gig drives but i'm hearing whispers and that all they are..that firewire 800 is not fast enough to handle the data transfer rates needed to edit 720 of 1080 hd footage.

My questions are:

-Can i go with a series daisy chained 250 gig hard drives? if not why? it's cheaper, reliable as if corrupted it only takes down one of the drives as lonsg as all the raw footage is backed up and you can set multiple scratchd discs to work from in fcp...right?

-Or should i go with Sata Raids systems? if so which one? is it compatible with mac pro xeon, needing a pci slot to work off.

- Or thirdly is a fibre card system required? which one whave people been using and having most reliability with.


Lonelyleap
www.lonelyleap.com
Documentary film.

[n8ture]

I edit all the time with Firewire 400 drives so you'll have no problems with Firewire 800.
Allot of times I'll have a Firewire 400 plugged into my laptop as well as an 800 and I've never had any issues.

[THoff]

Firewire 800 is theoretically eight times faster than what is needed for DVCProHD footage, which is 100Mbps. However, that's the best-case scenario, and in practice it will be slower.

I would look at eSATA enclosures, they offer up to 3GBps transfer rates. There are enclosures that will let you use all three common interfaces -- USB2, Firewire 400/800, and eSATA:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2026900,00.asp

[lonely leap]

Firewire 800 is theoretically eight times faster than what is needed for DVCProHD footage, which is 100Mbps. However, that's the best-case scenario, and in practice it will be slower.

I would look at eSATA enclosures, they offer up to 3GBps transfer rates. There are enclosures that will let you use all three common interfaces -- USB2, Firewire 400/800, and eSATA:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2026900,00.asp
thanks THoff And n8ture for your advise, two quite different opinions. THoff ..with eSATA drives how do they connect to say a Mac pro xeon? do you know and is it easy to install? do you need to buy a card and drive?

Anybody else got any experience of SATA drives or Editing with Firewire 800 and having diffaculties?

So am i right in saying for simple DVCPRO editing Fire800 is fine but for complex transitions working with a lot of layers on big projects some problems might begin to occur with Firewire 800 speeds where as a SATA Drive would deal with it fine?

thanks

[David Saraceno]

A MacPro has room for four internal SATA drives.

Unless I am missing something, why would you want to go with external SATA drives if you have that much room internally?

[nycfilmmaker]

dvcproHD needs around 155MB/s which is 1240Mb/s (1byte=8bits)
so firewire 800 is 800Mb/s which is still too slow not that it won't work but youi may get drop frames during playback

[Nathan Beaman]

dvcproHD needs around 155MB/s which is 1240Mb/s (1byte=8bits)
so firewire 800 is 800Mb/s which is still too slow not that it won't work but youi may get drop frames during playback
DVCPRO HD is only 5.6 MB/s at 23.98 fps and 14.5 MB/s at 60fps (both are rates for the video stream only). So yes you can edit off of firewire 800 and in theory if you did the math that would mean you could pull multiple streams of DVCPRO HD 23.98 video at the same time without dropping frames - life isn't theory though - pretty safe with one stream. When neccessary I've used FW800 in the field to cut stuff. Infact I am using 2 FW800 500 GB drives right now on my MBP and haven't dropped a frame yet. (crossing fingers)

[THoff]

eSATA is essentially SATA with a more robust connector and longer cable distances. If your system has SATA ports but not eSATA, the easiest way to connect eSATA drives is using a conversion bracket:

http://sewelldirect.com/eSATA-1port.asp

[Cees Mutsaers]

Nathan, can you give brand/type nr. of the 500 GB drives you are using?


DVCPRO HD is only 5.6 MB/s at 23.98 fps and 14.5 MB/s at 60fps (both are rates for the video stream only). So yes you can edit off of firewire 800 and in theory if you did the math that would mean you could pull multiple streams of DVCPRO HD 23.98 video at the same time without dropping frames - life isn't theory though - pretty safe with one stream. When neccessary I've used FW800 in the field to cut stuff. Infact I am using 2 FW800 500 GB drives right now on my MBP and haven't dropped a frame yet. (crossing fingers)

[BenB]

FW800 will handle DVCPRO-HD with no problems at all. I do it daily, never a problem. I would question daisy chaining more than one for editing. Every drive you add to the chain eats up more the the FW bandwidth. Just get one big ass FW800 drive. And don't forget to back up your stuff.

[Mongofilm]

FW800 is fast enough to edit 720 as well as 1080 footage, however like all projects if you have many hours of footage and you are constantly jumping around from drive to drive on a daisy chain, there will possibly be some lag time between certain cuts on a long format job. I have been successful at editing and recording direct to FW800 on a PowerBook G4 1ghz with 1 gig of Ram. I am still amazed that this situation works. So as long as you are smart with your HDD connections the editing should be fine.

[Thoma2jd]

Firewire is a bus mastering technology. SO unlike usb, you get consistent bus saturation (the whole 800Mbps or 100MBps), without requiring the processor to negotiate the link. However even the fastest ATA drives can only write at 60MBps in a sustainable manner. That means no matter how fast you connection, you will NEVER exceed the 800Mbps bandwidth of Firewire800.

[mico]

Firewire 800 is theoretically eight times faster than what is needed for DVCProHD footage, which is 100Mbps. However, that's the best-case scenario, and in practice it will be slower.

I would look at eSATA enclosures, they offer up to 3GBps transfer rates. There are enclosures that will let you use all three common interfaces -- USB2, Firewire 400/800, and eSATA:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2026900,00.asp

i have heard that one of the advantages to using sata enclosures other than being faster than firewire 800 is the lack of a bridge board like firewire drives have making them less prone to failure. just something to consider if you go with one of those multi interface enclosure which will have a bridgeboard.
Some enclosures also use cables between the drive and backpane of the enclosure while quality enclosures use a direct connect to the backpane

[Jason Ramsey]

If you get an eSATA enclosure, you won't need to buy any kind of adaptor for your desktop. Most eSATA enclosures com with one. As a matter of fact I have one just sitting in its package in a box, that I have never used. :)

Jason

[Cynic821]

ive edited on USB 2.0 5400 drives of other peoples. im sure 800 is more then enough.