GH3 Anyone Else Editing on a MacBook Pro?

Ianscreations said:
I really need some help optimizing my setup for editing GH3 footage on my GH3.
Can someone please read this post and offer me help? Thanks!
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...Pro-Scratch-Disks&p=1986332834#post1986332834
Click to expand...

Gave a longer answer on that thread... short answer here... I'd put previews on the 7200 drives rather than the 5400. Since playback is more noticeable if it 'hesitates', rather than a
'few minutes' longer render times, I'd go that route.
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
Gave a longer answer on that thread... short answer here... I'd put previews on the 7200 drives rather than the 5400. Since playback is more noticeable if it 'hesitates', rather than a
'few minutes' longer render times, I'd go that route.
Click to expand...

I agree with you that I don't necessarily need the fasted render time as I usually do something else while this runs. That being said, can you look at my reply? I'm confused if you think everything else should go on the 2TB Drive as well. Thanks!
 
It's not only about what you put on your internal drive or your external drive, it also depends on the speed with which you can read files. So a 7200rpm drive connected via USB 2.0 will only give you about 25MB/s read speed which is fine for playback of one ProRes encoded file (which is what I transcode all my GH3 footage to) but as soon as you try to play back multiple streams (i.e. multicam shoot, layering effects, etc...), you will start dropping frames and it becomes much more difficult and time-consuming to edit.

Using a hard drive connected by Firewire 800 will allow you to use 2-3 streams of ProRes footage w/o dropouts, and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt will allow your 7200RPM drive to read/write at pretty much it's maximum speed, which is ideal. Your bottleneck with editing on a MBPro is the hard drive speed and Thunderbolt/USB3 have seriously decreased this bottleneck.

So put your project on an external 7200rpm drive connected ideally by Thunderbolt (or firewire 800 as a last resort) and put all your scratch disks on that drive too. Just make sure your autosave vault is on your internal drive for your MBPro. Then you'll be set.

I use a Seagate GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter and just mount any standard internal drive to it and it works as a docking bay for me. I love it.
 
omnikron said:
It's not only about what you put on your internal drive or your external drive, it also depends on the speed with which you can read files. So a 7200rpm drive connected via USB 2.0 will only give you about 25MB/s read speed which is fine for playback of one ProRes encoded file (which is what I transcode all my GH3 footage to) but as soon as you try to play back multiple streams (i.e. multicam shoot, layering effects, etc...), you will start dropping frames and it becomes much more difficult and time-consuming to edit.

Using a hard drive connected by Firewire 800 will allow you to use 2-3 streams of ProRes footage w/o dropouts, and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt will allow your 7200RPM drive to read/write at pretty much it's maximum speed, which is ideal. Your bottleneck with editing on a MBPro is the hard drive speed and Thunderbolt/USB3 have seriously decreased this bottleneck.

So put your project on an external 7200rpm drive connected ideally by Thunderbolt (or firewire 800 as a last resort) and put all your scratch disks on that drive too. Just make sure your autosave vault is on your internal drive for your MBPro. Then you'll be set.

I use a Seagate GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter and just mount any standard internal drive to it and it works as a docking bay for me. I love it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the further explanation/clarification.
A couple quick follow-ups:
Why have the Auto Save on the MBPro itself? Should I also save the main project on the MBPro?
I always assumed I should have the files render out to a seperate drive. For example, if my footage is on the Lacie 2TB 7200 drive and I am creating an Encore project, I should render out to a 2nd external. Likewise with the scratchdisks. Am I wrong in this thought? The reason I thought this was that it would choke up the thunderbolt line if I am trying to read from and write to the very same drive. I don't know much about computers, so I could be way off in my thinking here.

Thanks again for all your help.
Sounds like (for now) I can rely on using only one external drive!


If I had 2 external 7200 drives, what setup would you suggest? Would this significantly improve anything other than render time?
 
You always want you project files saved somewhere other than your footage. That way if your HD crashes with your footage, if you (hopefully) have a backup of the original footage somewhere, you can then get a new hard drive, put the old footage back on it, and then open up your most recent autosaved file, reconnect the footage and continue as if nothing happened.

With today's technology, if you're working in 1080p with a standard editing codec, there's no reason to have 2 drives. Most of the time you are editing, you are reading from the drive. The only time I'm writing to the drive is when I'm rendering or exporting, and I can't think of a situation where you're really trying to do both at the same time, at least not for me using FCP 7. I don't use premiere, and maybe it renders in the background? But even if it does, rendering is a very CPU intensive task, and it doesn't write very quickly to the drive, so I'm sure the drive could handle both tasks just fine.

I find it hard to imagine you could choke up Thunderbolt.
 
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