3TB External HD ENOUGH to edit my film with?

M

Manomatul

New member
I plan on buying a LaCie d2 USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series 3TB External Hard Drive to use with Final Cut Pro X to edit my feature film with.
I have 15x 32GB SD cards filled with footage. The files codec is H.264. Resolution 1080p.

Is this 3TB external enough to get me through the edit without slowing down FCPX?

My mac specs are as follows:3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X4GB 512GB Flash Storage NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
Here is where it gets a little tricky. I was planning on transcoding everything for "Optimized Media" because I need to mess with a lot of filters and color correction tools. Some say I don't need to transcode and some say the native file is perfectly fine with work with. Now i'm a bit confused.
 
FCP X 10.1.2 has the ability to send files outside a Library. eg. render files.
This means you can farm out files to other drives if required unlike previous versions.

FYI: It's wise to stay with one version of FCP X during a Project.
Make a desicion and stick with it.
Changing mid stream is like opening "Pandoras Box".

Al
 
The problem with one 3TB drive is you have no backup. My rule of thumb is that for every drive I have, I need a second drive at least as big to back that first drive up on. Having been burned numerous times by various raid controllers I won't use raid as backup tool (only as a speed tool). As long as I always have two drives (ideally different models/different batches) the odds of losing both of them at the same time goes way down (though not to 0). I also only make new backups every week, so I could lose a week of work. As a result I also do project level backups (using scripts usually) on a daily basis(or more often), to either that backup drive or yet another drive. A cheap, slower, second drive for backup is a small price to pay for not losing your work.
 
Drives are relatively cheap. Time is not.

Whatever drive you wind up buying, you should budget for a backup drive and also a spare drive for when one of those fails.

Also, 4TB drives are not really that much more expensive than 3TB drives.
 
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