why cant anyone help me???

A

aalleexx

Veteran
here we go with a question that no one is really sure about I keep on getting the run around, here is my scenario
I have a dell laptop with core duo processors and 2 gigs of ram and sony vegas 6 all this is for editing, I have everything already my dvx100b, lights and the whole 9, the only thing that I need is an external HD but here is the problem my laptop has 4 usb2 ports and one 4 pin firewire 400 port
now... I am going to use the firewire port for connecting the camera to transfer footage to the computer but what about the external Hd? some say just get a firewiere hub and plug the camera and the external HD there, and some say dont do that because you will overload the firewire? so what can I do, can u guys tell me the set ups u guys have so I can get an idea of what to do because I am confussed. what external HD should I buy? g-raid is what people recommend u guys tell me what to do, thanks in advance
 
No don't do that, just use USB drives. They're plenty adequate for DV footage.

If you insist on wanting to use a firewire drive, you should look at getting an additional PCMCIA firewire card. But why bother? Just use USB drives. I recorded about 600gb of DVX footage for the indie movie Siren, all of it through DV Rack, using the camera attached to the 4-pin firewire port and recording straight to external USB2 hard disks. The workflow works fine.
 
ok thanks for that but what about the kind of hard drive? I keep on hearing about g-raid, I am shooting a full feature and thinking about 300gb external
what do u guys know about the g-raid 320gb, or which one do u recommend?
 
Or you could just get an external hard drive with 2 firewire ports, and daisy chain the camera to the hard drive.
 
That drive has a FW 800 connection and your laptop only has FW 400. So you will be paying for a super-fast connection that you can't use. I've used a 500gb FW 800 drive on a desktop and its as fast or faster than the internal drives. That's overkill for video capture which works fine even in HD over regular firewire. FW 800 is great for an editing drive because it can reduce rendering times on transitions and effects.

If you connect a hard drive that you will be capturing to the same port that you connect the camera, there is a risk that the two will run into contention trying to share the same bandwidth which could result in dropped frames. Its difficult to predict whether that will happen because it depends on how data is handled between the laptop and the FW interface, not just between the interface and the devices.

Since firewire drives are generally more expensive than USB drives, and USB 2.0 drives are plenty fast enough for capturing video, my preference is to take the obvious alternative, which is to keep the firewire for your camera and attach the disk to the laptop via USB, keeping the two data paths separate.

I shoot with 80-100gb mobile drives all the time, so I don't have to worry about extra power to run the disk in the field, it can just run off the laptop power. And then I transfer the footage to a larger disk for editing.
 
One option is to get a PCMCIA card with external SATA-connection (eSATA, 1,5Gb/s) and a drive that supports that, for example Seagate has a new 500GB eSATA drive. Haven't tried it but sounds like the best solution to me if you want a fast drive and fast rendering times.
 
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