Using FCP with 2 external HD's...Could it work?

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
I use my external HD when I am running FCP with my Macbook Pro laptop. I was looking at some portable HD's that are small enough to fit in your pocket and can be powered up by USB and run off the laptop's battery. So in the settings could I do both? Keep the settings of my original external hard drive and then use a portable powered by the USB if I wanted to work on a project say while I am on a plane or something like that?
 
USB is not good for editing. Now two Firewire 800 drives daisy chained are no problem.

Noah
 
I believe G-Raid's G-Drive-Mini might be what you're looking for. It is bus powered, has USB 2.0, FW400, and FW800. You can get it in sizes as large as 200GB. Not cheap, but could be what you need for a laptop in the field scenario.

Cheers.
 
USB 2 is not that fine for editing on a Mac. Trust me- you want FW800 or at least FW400. USB-2 is much slower than either because of the way the mac architecture is set up to work with USB and Firewire- especially on older machines.

Noah
 
Not sure what you're asking here...

If the issue is power, I wouldn't recommend daisy-chaining bus-powered drives. If you use 1 USB and one 1 firewire portable drive, your battery won't last too long. And I'd test the setup for reliability before doing anything critical.

If you can power them externally, you can use quite a few FW hard drives at once, daisy chained.

But it seems like you may be asking something about FCP settings? FCP projects keep all the scratch/capture/etc. locations; so if you set up your project on each drive to only use that drive for storage/scratch, then you can just swap the drives to swap projects....
 
NoahK said:
USB 2 is not that fine for editing on a Mac. Trust me- you want FW800 or at least FW400. USB-2 is much slower than either because of the way the mac architecture is set up to work with USB and Firewire- especially on older machines.

Noah
Click to expand...

The reason USB 2 is slower isn't because of how Apple implements but because of the way it's designed. For example, USB transfers data in bursts (which is bad for video work for obvious reasons) where as FW transfers data in a constant stream.


-A
 
adkimery said:
The reason USB 2 is slower isn't because of how Apple implements but because of the way it's designed. For example, USB transfers data in bursts (which is bad for video work for obvious reasons) where as FW transfers data in a constant stream.


-A
Click to expand...
Without being able to give a technical explanation, I know out of real live experience (external G-Raids on Mac and PC), that USB on a PC differs greatly from USB on a Mac.
Using USB on a Mac for anything but high data transfer is totally fine, but you can never reach the transfer speeds USB2.0 will get you on a PC (wich theoretically max-out FW400...)
I hope someone can step in and give a in-deep explanation of why...
 
Spartacus said:
Without being able to give a technical explanation, I know out of real live experience (external G-Raids on Mac and PC), that USB on a PC differs greatly from USB on a Mac.
Using USB on a Mac for anything but high data transfer is totally fine, but you can never reach the transfer speeds USB2.0 will get you on a PC (wich theoretically max-out FW400...)
I hope someone can step in and give a in-deep explanation of why...
Click to expand...

Don't have a technical explanation- though I'm sure one exists. Speaking strictly from experience. Not that it's a big deal- most good external drives for Mac have USB and FW800 so not a biggie to use one or the other.

-Noah
 
I use 2 USB drives at work for SD video editing all the time. one drive for capturing, one drive for exporting finished files. works like a charm.

wouldn't try it with HD though
 
Trying it is fine, and it certainly will "work". It'll just be slow - which may be tolerable for some, less so for others. I've had projects where I was simultaneously using 4 FW drives and 2 USB drives (NOT BUS POWERED!!). If you plan right, using multiple drives can increase your speed. I've found this to be the case often with FW drives. But yes, USB 2.0 drives seem significantly slower to me on the Mac... though it may be explained by the fact that I buy cheapo USB drives for temporary needs, and get top quality FW drives for critical recording/storage...
 
Noel Evans said:
Cant go past this for size and speed. Bus powered via fw also.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11037
Click to expand...

I ordered two G-Raid mini last year, but although they claimed being able to run bus powered they wouldn´t start on our MBPs.

I didn´t get much help from the G-Raid support and returned them.

Later I found out that some drives will use an additional USB port to draw power, but neither documentation nor phone support mentioned that as a possible solution...

So, do you use the laCie drives successfully?

Also, since they are fanless, how hot do they get? (Heat kills HDD...)
 
I think some people mis-read what I was asking. You know when you set up your Scratch discs you have one set to store your footage and you use to save your projects on and not your system drive? Well I got to thinking if I was on a plane how could I work on a final cut pro project while sitting in my seat. I would need a bus powered hard drive since I would have no where to plug in my external drive that I would normally use. In terms of the settings would I add the new hard drive as a another scratch disc and use that when I am on a plane and then when I have access to A/C switch the settings back and use my main external hard drive. That is what I meant by can you use 2 HD's with FCP not meaning can you daisy chain them.

Hope that clears everything up.
 
Of course you can do that. But the problem is if you change capture scratch to drive a and then set up project 1, then you cannot use drive b with this project unless you transfer all the relevent files over and reconnect.
 
Spartacus said:
On a Mac?
Which format did you capture? HD?
Click to expand...

PC. There's no OnLocation for Mac, but there are similar appz - ScopeBox, HD Monitor Pro, if I'm not mistaken.

I recorded DVCPRO HD 720p.

I made tests and OnLocation would record normally 720p and 1080 even on the internal 5400 rpm drive.

The recording to the external USB\SATA drive was a breeze.
 
karapetkov said:
PC. There's no OnLocation for Mac, but there are similar appz - ScopeBox, HD Monitor Pro, if I'm not mistaken.

I recorded DVCPRO HD 720p.

I made tests and OnLocation would record normally 720p and 1080 even on the internal 5400 rpm drive.

The recording to the external USB\SATA drive was a breeze.
Click to expand...
Well, no offence, but maybe you should have read through all posts - half the discussion was about using USB on a MAC(!)...
USB on a PC is fast and fine, on a MAC it doesn´t come close to it´s intended performance...

- Spart
 
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