Editing HD straight from SD cards?

Hello,

I have a question about editing HD video using Adobe Premiere and footage from a class 10 SD card (Sandisk Extreme). My editing machine is a 24" imac with dual core 3.06Ghz pentium, 12 GB RAM, 500 GB internal HD and 2TB external drive connected via ilink 800.

I'm looking for a way to inexpensively speed up my editing process and am wondering if I can edit directly from my SD cards by plugging one into the SD slot and connecting the other through an SD reader of some sort (I'd like iLink but I can't find one). Currently I dump my cards to my external drive and edit from there (no problems with that, I'm just trying to avoid a step).

Does anyone have experience reading footage and editing directly from SD cards or do you think that'll just be too slow and I should continue with my current setup?

Thanks for your help.

simsaladimbamba said:

The advantage of copying the footage to another external Firewire 800 HDD (i.Link is Sony's name for Firewire, especially that 4-pin Firewire 400 port found on DV cameras) is that you can edit faster and access the data faster and that you can create backups faster.
What if the random access to the SD cards during editing diminishes their lives and you haven't created any backups yet?

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That is an excellent point - I run the risk of shortening the life of my SD cards. Thanks for that feedback!

Matt

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kohlson said:

There are perhaps two bottlenecks with your proposed SD solution. An SD card, give or take, is 5-10x slower than a disk drive. Cards vary significantly in speed (R/W) but are always much slower than a disk. The other bottleneck is the I/O to the SD card. If this is the direct slot on the side of a Mac, this is probably not a big deal, but if USB or FW, that adds another layer of the slows. Also, there is some thinking that these cards aren't that durable when used as a drive.

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More excellent feedback! I think I'll stick with disk drives.

Matt