Vegas with external hard-drive

G

grantly

Member
I'm buying my first external hard-drive and I was wondering if I need to get firewire(400 or 800) or just USB 2.0

I'll be using it with Vegas and a lot of 24pa SD footage, so I didn't know if USB 2.0 is fast enough to stream that data into vegas or if I would need a firewire drive.

Thanks!
 
It is always best to get the fastest connection you can afford. Short of using fiber or other types of connections, the following is a good rule for connection speeds.

eSATA > FW800 > FW400 > USB 2.0
 
I've heard people claim problems trying to capture video to an external hard disk, because the computer in the middle can't simultaneously accept data from the camera and squirt it out to the disk fast enough. Although that sounds like a limitation of the computer itself (the CPU or its i/o chips) rather than firewire/USB itself.

anyone had any such experiences? Is it perhaps disappearing as 'average' computers get faster and faster?
 
I've had no problems capturing DV to an external USB2 drive with multiple different machines - a P4 Mobile laptop running at 2 ghz with 512 mb of ram, a 2ghz AMD desktop, and a dual 2.4ghz P4 desktop with a gig of ram.
 
It has never been an issue for me. But if you're really worried about it, you can just capture to the machine's internal drive and then transfer it to the external. But again, it has never been an issue.
 
David Jimerson said:
It has never been an issue for me. But if you're really worried about it, you can just capture to the machine's internal drive and then transfer it to the external. But again, it has never been an issue.
Click to expand...

Are you capturing DV? or HD/HDV?

I've been wondering if its possible to capture HDV str8 to an external drive using USB 2.0.
 
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Both DV and HDV through Firewire are roughly 3.8 megabytes per second. USB 2.0 is capable of real-world transfer rates around 30 megabytes per second. In other words, it shouldn't be a problem.
 
How about a Mini Portable Hard Drive 250GB USB 2.0 (small in size, easy to carry).

There are two Brands that I was looking at: One is the 'Maxtor One Touch 4 mini' and the other one is a 'Free Agent Go (Seagate)'.

I will be shooting HD 1080 and will be downloading the 16GB P2 card onto the field laptop and want to copy the footage onto the mini hard drive for back up safety. When I get back to base camp I will back up the footage to another external hard drive (Desktop - 500GB).
 
New_Zealand said:
How about a Mini Portable Hard Drive 250GB USB 2.0 (small in size, easy to carry).

There are two Brands that I was looking at: One is the 'Maxtor One Touch 4 mini' and the other one is a 'Free Agent Go (Seagate)'.

I will be shooting HD 1080 and will be downloading the 16GB P2 card onto the field laptop and want to copy the footage onto the mini hard drive for back up safety. When I get back to base camp I will back up the footage to another external hard drive (Desktop - 500GB).
Click to expand...

i would assume you would be able to transfer files onto it just like any other external HD...
 
I ended up going with a Lacie 1TB external drive, as it has all 4 inputs. Got it cheap too!

Thanks for all the input!
 
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