Lap top specs for the 200
- Thread starter brianluce
- Start date
capturing the footage from the HVX isnt gonna be the problem, any laptop should do, just get as big of a drive as you can. Now cutting the HD footage, is gonna be a whole other story.
petelms
Well-known member
What do you think, are those USB/FIREWIRE harddrives working also without problems with capturing the HVX200? I mean, I already have quite decent laptop, but it has rather small harddrive. So, would it be a good idea to buy an external HD for my laptop? :happy: It maybe faster than the internal hd...am I right? I think it's 5200rpm...or something like that.
therealslimfigge
Active member
is there a minimum requirement for hdd speed?
has anyone heard the system requirements for hdrack?
has anyone heard the system requirements for hdrack?
Bart_Boge
Well-known member
Powerbook Set-up
Powerbook Set-up
In the Mac world, I would think any of the latest 15" or 17" AluBooks would do the job. In order to prevent any possible i/o bottlenecks, however, it might be smart to use separate FireWire buses--one for capture from the HVX and another for the external HHD RAID array. This is easily accomplished by adding a cheap ($75) CardBus slot FW400/800 card. That way data communication is never shared on the same FW bus. Run the camera straight into the internal FW port on the Powerbook, and hook your capture drives up via the Cardbus FW card. Seeing that the FW protocol can handle 4x-8x the bandwidth of the DVCHD codec, that shouldn't be a problem.
You might run two or more FW drives off of the CardBus card as a soft RAID array (easily configured in OS X). 7200rpm drives with 8MB buffers by a name brand should be sufficient. Two of them would easily handle the throughput. BTW, tests show that CardBus FW800 writes as fast as the internal FW800 of a Powerbook, and both write WAY FASTER than ANY G5 TOWER due to a goofy G5 CPU glitch. Click here for more info on that:
http://www.barefeats.com/fire42.html
I currently record hour-long audio projects @ 192k/24 bit (up to 8 tracks at a time). I also do SD video with up to four streams at once playing. For drives I use Barracuda 250GB 7200rpm/8MB drives ($125 ea) into Wiebetech FW800 ComboDocks ($150 ea) with this system. No problems. The ComboDocks allow for 30-second raw drive swap-outs, which means I can use HHDs as my final storage medium (just build it into my costs).
I wouldn't edit this way, but for capture it would be fine.
The i/o bottleneck in any scheme like this is not the laptop's CPU or the DVC/FW protocol itself--it is how fast your drives can write what the camera-FW(in)-CPU-FW(out)data chain feeds them. Disk speed is the brake to this runaway data train.
Powerbook Set-up
In the Mac world, I would think any of the latest 15" or 17" AluBooks would do the job. In order to prevent any possible i/o bottlenecks, however, it might be smart to use separate FireWire buses--one for capture from the HVX and another for the external HHD RAID array. This is easily accomplished by adding a cheap ($75) CardBus slot FW400/800 card. That way data communication is never shared on the same FW bus. Run the camera straight into the internal FW port on the Powerbook, and hook your capture drives up via the Cardbus FW card. Seeing that the FW protocol can handle 4x-8x the bandwidth of the DVCHD codec, that shouldn't be a problem.
You might run two or more FW drives off of the CardBus card as a soft RAID array (easily configured in OS X). 7200rpm drives with 8MB buffers by a name brand should be sufficient. Two of them would easily handle the throughput. BTW, tests show that CardBus FW800 writes as fast as the internal FW800 of a Powerbook, and both write WAY FASTER than ANY G5 TOWER due to a goofy G5 CPU glitch. Click here for more info on that:
http://www.barefeats.com/fire42.html
I currently record hour-long audio projects @ 192k/24 bit (up to 8 tracks at a time). I also do SD video with up to four streams at once playing. For drives I use Barracuda 250GB 7200rpm/8MB drives ($125 ea) into Wiebetech FW800 ComboDocks ($150 ea) with this system. No problems. The ComboDocks allow for 30-second raw drive swap-outs, which means I can use HHDs as my final storage medium (just build it into my costs).
I wouldn't edit this way, but for capture it would be fine.
The i/o bottleneck in any scheme like this is not the laptop's CPU or the DVC/FW protocol itself--it is how fast your drives can write what the camera-FW(in)-CPU-FW(out)data chain feeds them. Disk speed is the brake to this runaway data train.