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External Hard Drive improves video editing?

R

randayanday

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 1, 2012
1
0
Hey , i have a MacBook Pro late 2010 model . Im a heavy video editor using Final Cut Pro X and After Effects. Its becoming more and more lagy and jumpy when editing especially with green screen and multiple layers. I'm coming up to short film for my major piece and this is going to require a numerous amount of footage , i really dont think my MacBook Pro can handle it. I have read that an External Hard Drive with a 7200rpm and Firewire 400 or 800 "could" improve my video editing. But "could" it really? These hard drives arn't cheap . My specs are

NVIDIA GeForce 320M:

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 320M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCI
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)

With a 250 GB and 115GB available

what about a LaCie 500GB Rugged Hard Disk
?

Any help would be great
 
Last edited:
As posted by Miles, a standard external won't help you....AN SSD or a RAID array is the only way to achieve greater speeds...I am awaiting delivery of a Pegasus R$...Okay, it's expensive, but with Thunderbolt and the correct configuration high speed Data transfer up around 120MBS is claimed...Others have posted even higher speeds using RAID 5.....More info:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14800909#post14800909
 
Video Editing FCP and External Hard drives

I have a iMac and going to start a video project. I am not sure if I should have the original video footage on an external hard drive or the iMac itself? Or if I should have the original video footage only on the iMac and set the capture and scratch disk etc. to the external? Please advise! Thanks
 
I don't think any non-SSD external drive would make your experience faster in any way. USB 2.0 disks are much slower than your internal drive by design. A FireWire 800 disk may be able to transfer data at up to 97MB/s, but that depends on the design of the disk and the computer as well.

The only possible scenario in which an external would benefit you appears to be if your main internal drive is full.
 
It won't make it faster the way you've described using it, but if you move all your old content to an external drive once you're done that will free up and speed up your internal drive for better performance.
 
New Question

Can someone answer my question? Thanks

Mac2310 said:
I have a iMac and going to start a video project. I am not sure if I should have the original video footage on an external hard drive or the iMac itself? Or if I should have the original video footage only on the iMac and set the capture and scratch disk etc. to the external? Please advise! Thanks
Click to expand...
 
My primary concern is not speed it is making sure nothing gets lost and the ability to take what I do on final cut and go somewhere else and being able to open up final cut and continue editing as if I was on home computer that I started editing on. Any advice on that? Where should original footage be and where should I set capture scratch to?
Thanks
 
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