Capturing DV on Internal Drive

[cemorris]

According to this post DV Duscussion
"Rod Rod" claims it is bad to capture and edit movies on your primary internal system drive as it will cause problems. I have a powerbook which I capture all my DV onto the primary internal drive and edit it when I get a chance. When I am done with the project I remove all unused clips and then copy it over to my external drive to keep. What kind of damage am I doing? I have not had anything bad happen as of yet. It would be ashame if I had to be always connected to my external drive while editing movies. This is the main reason I got a laptop as I can copy all source material to my drive and edit whereever and whenever I please.

 

[robbieduncan]

None. The problems that might occurr would be speed/contention related. If you are trying to write DV to teh drive and the system needs to use it to swap memory pages in/out you might find the system gets really slow and/or some frame drops in the DV stream. If you were to totally fill the drive it would be a bad idea as well! As long as you have enough RAM that no swapping is needed it'll be fine

 

[Norouzi]

Well in my expirence, if you can, it is better to have a seperate drive used specificly for DV capture. It's just easier on the drive since One drive will spin to capture video and one drive spins to run the capture program. You are less likely to get frame drops like this. As for causing file system damage, or other harmful things if you capture DV to your main drive, I've never heard of any serious problems from it. I mean there are litterly thousands of people using their iMac's and iBooks for DV editing and they've only got one drive. I'd say if your concerned about the file system, after your done your heavy DV stuff boot up from the Panther CD and run the disk utility. The only other problem I could see possibly happening is shortening the Hard Drives life by having it spin continuosly, but unless you import DV 24hrs a day 365 days a year I wouldn't be too concerned about it.

EDIT: Dang, beaten to it while I was typing.

 

[Mechcozmo]

You don't want to fill up your internal drive with a lot of stuff, then purge it. It can be bad for the filesystem. Also, if the internal drive has a low rpm (4200) then it can be spinning as fast as it can for long periods of time to get your work done.