Firewire Drive recommendations for uncompressed media?

O

Omar67

Active member
Hello,

Hope all is well with everyone. Anyways, I own a Pentium 4 3.60 ghz CPU and have AVID XPRESS 5.2.2. In the past, i have edited several features on an SONY Z1U HDV camera and have edited and outputted the footage etc. with no problems. I captured and stored all the HDV media/footage on an external Western Digital firewire Drive 320 GB and transcoded and outputted the feature on the computer's internal hardrive with no problems.
I now have to produce features that are HD uncompressed. I have the Panasonic HVX200 HD camera and photographed 16 minutes of 1080I/60 footage and have exported directly from the p-2 card into an external Western Digital External fire wire drive. I did not go through AVID to capture the footage on to the external fire wire drive. I then started up AVID and have imported all the footage using media tool. So far no problems. I do notice however some slight stuttering when sometimes playing the footage on AVID. It is not in the same places. I read somewhere online that i need to have a fast external hard drive for uncompressed footage/media the recommendation was 200 MB/sec for 1080i work. Maybe this is causing the problem??? I don't know. When i play the footage (by hitting the format button to 30 ntsc) there is no stuttering on the playback. Strange. I do not recall having this problem when editing on HDV. How do i find out the mb/sec configuration of my external firewire drives. I have to purchase some high GB drives (1000 at least) anyway - does anyone have any recommendations for what type of firewire drives to purchase for uncompressed HD 1080I footage?
let me know fellow HVX200/Xpress editor/users.

:huh:
Thanx,
Zack
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I would look into an eSATA RAID array, eSATA has much higher throughput than either FW400 or FW800.
 
I agree with THoff's post about eSATA, however DVCPro HD 1080i footage from the HVX is not uncompressed HD. It is not heavily compressed like HDV but it should still play OK on a firewire 800 drive. A G-Raid FW 800 drive will give better performance than a single FW800 drive but I would go with a SATA raid.
BTW, is the footage at 24p? Did you remove the pulldown? If not that could be the reason for the stuttering.
 
"however DVCPro HD 1080i footage from the HVX is not uncompressed HD"

Yes :) I just found that out this morning. This is very very helpful thank you both. Hmmm i did not remove the pull down. I shot it at 24p but put it in AVID Xpress at 1080/59.9. I shot some footage at 24p Advanced and some at footage at the non-advanced function. Actually, ahem (yes i am a novice when it comes to HD) how do you remove the pulldown?

Also, if i get eSata drives, how will i be able to tranfer P2 card footage directly to a Sata external drive. Isn't the only way to export p2 card and FS100 footage/media is through a firewire port? (1394 host on the HVX200 menu). eSata Drives (Seagate etc.) only have Sata ports. I plan on shooting future projects with the firestore FS 100, because it can retain much more than 8 minutes etc. (and er uh the rental of the FS100 and a 8 gig Ps Card are exactly the same in NYC) Does the FS100 system export with a Sata port? Or is this mearly i can output on a firewire drive and transfer that footage on a Sata drive and use the Sata Drives for better performance. Or will this screw up the original footage by going back and forth between drives, etc.

thanx,
Zack
 
I'm not familiar with the AVID interface but in FCP P2 import window there is a preferenvce you check for removing the advanced pulldown.
You can hook the FS100 up to a FW port on the computer and the eSATA drive up to a SATA card on the computer and copy away.
 
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