Editing off wireless hard drive

S

svem

Active member
I recently got a MacBook Pro Laptop and one of the benefits of it is its portability, battery life and size. When editing however, with big video files and RAW photo files, you need to store your footage onto a bunch of large capacity external USB hard drives which you then need to plug into the laptop. So its another piece you have to attach into the laptop that limits the benefits of its portability. And its not convenient having a portable USB hard drive hanging from the USB port while sitting in bed editing :)

I was wondering if there is a setup or product out there that allows you to store your files externally on a large capacity hard drive and is also fast enough that you can edit big video and photo files (photoshop premiere, final cut) over a local or internet connectionk?

One thing I have come across is the Seagate Wireless Plus External Hard drive

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/seagate-wireless-plus-external-hard-drive/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7StxxG8Joo

Would this be fast enough to edit over a local network without any buffering or delays? How would it effect editing if its even possible?

One downside to it seems to be if you are connected to it then you can't connect to your internet connection at the same time since they are on different networks.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.
 
I've got a network storage drive on my system here, so I just tried a project on my macbook, using the network drive for the video files. It failed miserably. I thought it was going to work, until somebody accessed the net on another machine, when premiere cc stuttered, then froze. Stopping playback, then restarting worked a couple of times and then I had to quit premiere. The way computers connect to the net in idle time to update and do other housekeeping tasks is just pushing it. Premiere was happy with audio files - I had time to try four at the same time, and this seemed to work, but adding just one HD video stream was too much.

I've no idea of any of my wifi's technical capability - it's just the usual BT business router. Does this help?

I've got a couple of WD type external drives and they cope pretty well, and although a bit heavy, they're not too bad, and there are some smaller ones out there?
 
It is very likely to be quite unreliable. You need consistent throughput, and a fairly fat pipe. Maybe someday it'll be feasible, but that day is not today.
 
Hey paulears, thanks for taking the time to test out the network drive. I guess it seems network hard drive speeds are not there yet to do intensive video editing work.

What about for photo editing? Could a network drive handle photo editing in lightroom and photoshop?
 
I'd think photo editing (along with word processing, spreadsheets, etc) would be fine - e.g. a half-second delay due to other network traffic will barely be noticeable. Video editing is different because of the vast amount of data that needs to be shuffled around at great speed.
 
That's no trouble, and I do that here as a matter of course - I keep all my images and backup data on the two network drives. I do keep video backups of critical stuff there too, but network congestion just seems not up to it at present. My Macbook is also very random in how it treats these drives. Sometimes it can access them, but other times it takes a couple of tries. Network management is a bit of a mystery, to be honest.
 
paulears said:
I've no idea of any of my wifi's technical capability - it's just the usual BT business router. Does this help?

I've got a couple of WD type external drives and they cope pretty well, and although a bit heavy, they're not too bad, and there are some smaller ones out there?
Click to expand...

Say for the moment that USB harddrive sustained speeds are in the 10-30 MegaBYTES/second range...

Say... 10 MB/s... that would be a 80 MegaBITS/second rate... WIFI varies between... nothing... to something-less-than-the-touted-performance...

I'd say you'd be lucky to get 3-5 Megabytes/s, for "G" type WIFI, which would be about 24-40 Mb/s(with a max 57 Mb/s (*))... sure on a cold day, no interference from the neighbors, the neighbors Microwave, etc... maybe better... and a 'very short, but not too short, distance' from the AP to the computer...

With N you may get better reliability, and I can 'stream' Netflix and the like, where the stream application buffers several seconds worth of video, so that small gaps of streaming can be covered... but it is not something I'd bank on for accessing video media for editing...

(All these numbers are rough estimates, such as 10 MB/s == 80 Mb/s... but they are within about 10-15% or so...)

To sum up... there are several issues...

Network latency...
perhaps small in a local network with everything on copper. Could be much larger for WIFI connections.

Network Media Availability...
even copper networks have congestion if there are lots of users... for the 'home' office this is probably not as great an issue... unless everyone is recording their favorite streams via some video app...

In the case of WIFI, not only do 'local to the house' users add to congestion, neighbors either with their own WIFIs or other 2.4/5.8 GHz devices will add to the freeforall access to the 'airwave' medium.

Network Storage Device issues
Latency, multiple users, etc. have similar effects of lowering performance from max specs.

*WIFI uses as a 'natural' bandwidth of 20 MHz of the 2.4 or 5.8 frequency bands. To 'double' speed, devices then use 40 MHz. What that means is that perhaps there will be even more likelihood of 'interference' from others... there is no free lunch...
 
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