capturing to a firewire drive

STORYTELLER32

STORYTELLER32

Well-known member
Hi all,
Well, it happened. I ran out of space on my internal drive so I had to buy an external firewire drive. Now I'm nervous. I have new footage I need to capture and add to an existing timeline edit.

Can anyone give me a quick "how to" about capturing my new footage to this drive? Will there be any issues I'll run into with editing from an external firewire drive? If so, is there something I should watch out for? Or am I just being paranoid... ::)

Thanks in advance
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

Your just being paranoid.

If your drive is at least 7200RPM, you will have no problems. Just go to System Settings, and "set" the new drive as your second scratch disk.

'nuff said.
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

Hi Dashwood,
Are you sure? I did some research on the 2pop forum and someone else posted the following:

"All Macintosh computers only have a single Firewire bus on their motherboard, usually with 2 or more ports. Adding a PCI Firewire host card will double your total throughput when accessing more than one drive. Firewire buses share the bandwidth amoung the devices when chained to a single Firewire bus. Separating drives onto independent buses will dramatically increase performance when accessing more than one attached device.When your most common usage does not require concurrent access to multiple Firewire devices installing multiple Firewire buses is of lesser benefit."

So if that's the case, would having my camera and firewire drive connected and in use at the same time for the capture cause a problem? Or have you done this yourself without issue?

Thanks again
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

I added an external firewire drive to my powerbook and there was no problem, but now all of the sudden (and I'm not sure if it's related to the new drive), Whenever I go to export a sequence, a window pops up telling me that it can't find certain files, and I click "ok" and it takes me to my final cut folders to search for it. I can never find the files it is asking me for so I just keep clicking random files until it starts exporting. The weird thing is that no matter what files I choose, the exported file looks the same. I'm not sure what that is about.
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

Hey Guys
The system bus on a laptop can not handle capture to an external drive with out risks. It may work, but you could roll craps too. If you have a powerbook, you can get a firewire PCM card for the second device. If you have the 12" or a ibook, you really should capture to your internal drive, then before using the footage transfer it out to your external drive. It sucks, but it is the way to go.
And storyteller now that you have an external drive, you should consider putting all your media on that drive. If you have media on your system drive it tends to chug up the computer. You will find you will have far less crash and burns if your media is not on the same drive as the system and the software.
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

Storyteller... Are you running on a Powerbook?

I used to have the original 400Mhz Titanium, and was able to have my Lacie FW 40Gb and camera chained together without problems. (FCP3 + OS9.2.1/10.1)

If you are on a desktop, you should have no problems. I have had 5 FW drives chained together and the camera hooked up to the other firewire port on my desktop G4 without any dropped frames, or other issues.

Tim
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

[quote author=STORYTELLER32 link=board=FCP;num=1088635616;start=0#2 date=07/01/04 at 12:25:22]Hi Dashwood,
Are you sure? I did some research on the 2pop forum and someone else posted the following:

"All Macintosh computers only have a single Firewire bus on their motherboard, usually with 2 or more ports. Adding a PCI Firewire host card will double your total throughput when accessing more than one drive. Firewire buses share the bandwidth amoung the devices when chained to a single Firewire bus. Separating drives onto independent buses will dramatically increase performance when accessing more than one attached device.When your most common usage does not require concurrent access to multiple Firewire devices installing multiple Firewire buses is of lesser benefit."

So if that's the case, would having my camera and firewire drive connected and in use at the same time for the capture cause a problem? Or have you done this yourself without issue?

Thanks again[/quote]






However, I have captured without problems for years on a single-channel FW400 powerbook.  Currently, I also use a powerbook with an FW400 chain connected to the FW800 port and the camera to the FW400 port.

I think you are much more likely to have had problems capturing to the external drive than you would to an external FW drive. Fragmentation and drive contention are greater issues than FW chaining for 25Mbps video capture (on a Mac, anyway).

So: Make sure you maintain your capture drive well... try and wipe it between projects, or at least partition it in such a way that you can wipe a capture partition for each project.  The more full ANY disc is, or the more fragmented, the more likely it is you'll have problems.

But, in short... you should have NO PROBLEM AT ALL capturing with a camera and HD on the same FW400 chain.
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

I have my iPod and Xternal FW drive hooked up at the same time....didn't notice any problems...
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

Thanks for the responses guys. And to answer the question, I have a tower (g4 dual 450mhz). I was going to just use the firewire to clear some space off of my internal drive and then capture to the internal. But I'll try it straight to the firewire instead.

Thanks again
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

You'll want to make your external the main capture drive.  Check out the Apple forums for a long, detailed answer why.  Also, I just got the Lacie d2 250GB HD two days ago.  I connect that to my firewire 800 on the 17" PB, then I connect my cam to the firewire 400 on the PB.  Everything works like a dream.  No dropped frames, no missing files, etc.

I did have a problem when I first got it as I moved a couple of smaller projects I had floatin' around over to the new HD.  There were a couple of missing files at first, which were really just in there new home on the external.  Once I reconnected everything with their new paths, it all was fine.

Good luck,
Chico
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

[quote author=Prairieboy link=board=FCP;num=1088635616;start=0#4 date=07/01/04 at 12:37:53]Hey Guys
The system bus on a laptop can not handle capture to an external drive with out risks.  It may work, but you could roll craps too.  If you have a powerbook, you can get a firewire PCM card for the second device. [/quote]

As someone who does this every week and has all the way back to the original 400 Ti Book I'll weigh in. The original Titaniums (the 400 and 500) had very slow firewire ports and could give you problems on playback. Every Powerbook since then is fine for working with. I did a boatload of editing on the 667 without incident. In fact I used it to teach and had it mirroring to a projector at the same time without incident. Now, my 17" 1.33 has zero issues.
 
Re: capturing to a firewire drive

[quote author=ullanta link=board=FCP;num=1088635616;start=0#6 date=07/01/04 at 16:19:54]
That's just not true. Older Mac towers had dual-channel firewire; current  macs (except iMac/iBook/12" Powerbook) have AT LEAST separate 800 and 400Mbps firewire channels, I think the towers have dual 400 and single 800.[/quote]

None of the recent G4's have more than a single controller chip. Even the new G5's have a single controller chip for the 400 and 800 ports, which includes the ones on the front and the back...
 
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