Editing 4k with A7s/Shogun footage: Thunderbolt or USB 3.0?

M

MikeKozlenko

Member
I will soon be upgrading my camera, so I was wondering which external drives to get if I will be editing ProRes 4k that comes from a Shogun/A7s combo or compressed 4k from an a7rII . Are thunderbolt drives a requirement? Or are USB 3.0 drives fast enough? RAID is out of the question for me, too pricey.
 
Mac or PC? Theoretically usb 3 will be fine, but if you're on PC the quicktime wrapper will kill your performance and there is nothing you can do about it.
 
Doesn't matter either way for a single conventional drive as the read / write speed is the limiting factor and not the connector - you will need SSD or RAID 0 to edit 4k.
 
You're saying an external thunderbolt drive (not part of a RAID system) can't handle 4k at all? What do people do when they're on the road and can't really take their RAID system with them? (when they have to edit 4k on their laptop away from their main editing suite)
 
What Shirozina is saying is that the speed of the connectors often outpace the read/write speeds of the drives used to edit. USB 3 is plenty fast enough, but if the actual drive is slow, then you'll notice a bottleneck. I will disagree a little bit with his assertion that you NEED an SSD or RAID to edit... they are certainly ideal, but I've edited 4k off fast 7200 rpm hdds (100+ MB/s) and it's been fine. Once you start editing really long form stuff, thats where I feel you see a huge improvement with better drives.
 
I would add that editing 4K at 1/2 resolution improves realtime performance a lot on my system. In Premiere, this is very simple to do without any proxy's or additional file creations.
 
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