80GB iMac Hard Drive and Final Cut Express Use

[anastasis]

Is this enough space for my students to work with Final Cut Express or should I have gone with the 160 GB one?

 

[evil_santa]

i think its 13GB per hour of DV. you can always add extra FW driver as you need them. Though it is recomended that you have your media on a different disk to your system disk.

 

[Horrortaxi]

A good rule of thumb is to have 5 times more disk space than you project will take up. So if you have a 2 hour movie, a 120GB disk will be minimally acceptable. That's a dedicated 120GB--no OS or other files. As Evil Santa said, a dedicated disk is the best way to go.

 

[anastasis]

Thanks for the replies. It will be no problem for me to pick up a couple of 150 gig firewire drives for next year. Maybe even one for the Dual G5 they are buying me too!

 

[mnstr_trd_sd]

I am a student and we use FCP 4 on Powermacs with 60Gig hardrives at school. Ram is what is important, at least 512. At home i've got one of my powermac quicksilvers running FCP4 on a single 933 and a dual 1.44. I find with maxed out ram(1.5Gig) on a single 933, FCP 4 can be a bit tempermental but on the dual, it flys. I suggest using duals.

I've tried using FC Express on my single and it worked fine. The only thing is, once my files started getting realy big, FC started running slower. It could be because of the single processor and the out dated video card though. I hope this helped.

 

[Horrortaxi]

The only thing is, once my files started getting realy big, FC started running slower. It could be because of the single processor and the out dated video card though. I hope this helped.

Video card isn't a factor. Processor and RAM are going to be a big deal. But if you have 1 drive with everything it's going to get accessed a lot. The OS has to use it for normal operations, FCP will access the media on it, and then virtual memory is going to keep hitting the drive. That'll slow everything right down and the bigger the FCP file the slower it'll get.

 

[musicpyrite]

 

[Horrortaxi]

You don't say!