Final Cut Studio Upgrade Help

[Nickwell24]

Okay, so I finally took the plunge to get Final Cut Studio. I've been working off express for awhile now, but needed Motion and Soundtrack. I have a few things I'm looking to get to help the system work better:

1) External Hard Drive for Scratch Disc

Can't decide between a USB 2.0 and FW800 HD, Money is an issue so i'm curious if you all have tried using a usb 2.0 as a scratch disc.

2) Additional 4GB RAM to help run motion

Which route will I see a better improvement on initially? I don't have money for both upgrades. The projects I create are normally just 2-5 minute HD product overviews, nothing too intensive.

Currently my system is the iMac 27" Quad-Core i5 2.66, 4GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive.

 

[ppc_michael]

Final Cut Pro is still 32-bit, so I do not think you will find much benefit from an additional 4GB of RAM.

I have always preferred Firewire 800 drives for speed, reliability, and they tend to be built better. But I think to properly answer your USB2 vs FW800 question, we need to know what kind of video you're working with, in terms of resolution and codecs.

 

[CaptainChunk]

Okay, so I finally took the plunge to get Final Cut Studio. I've been working off express for awhile now, but needed Motion and Soundtrack. I have a few things I'm looking to get to help the system work better:

1) External Hard Drive for Scratch Disc

Can't decide between a USB 2.0 and FW800 HD, Money is an issue so i'm curious if you all have tried using a usb 2.0 as a scratch disc.

2) Additional 4GB RAM to help run motion

Which route will I see a better improvement on initially? I don't have money for both upgrades. The projects I create are normally just 2-5 minute HD product overviews, nothing too intensive.

Currently my system is the iMac 27" Quad-Core i5 2.66, 4GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive.

I'd avoid using USB 2.0 drives as scratch disks. First, USB 2.0 can't sustain the same level of bandwidth as a FireWire interface can. Second, more often than not, USB 2.0 drives use slower 5,400-rpm disks. They're fine for backups and data storage, but you really need a faster drive for editing, especially at HD frame sizes. Otherwise, you risk dropping frames.

A RAM upgrade would speed things up a bit while multitasking FCP and Motion, but also realize that they're both still 32-bit applications and won't use more than 4GB of RAM running by themselves. But one area where additional RAM will help a lot is when encoding with Apple Compressor, using a virtual cluster in QMaster. 2GB per CPU core for the rendering job is the sweet spot in that case.

 

[Nickwell24]

Thanks for the feedback, it definitely sounds like the HD is the area I should visit first. Any suggestions as to what is a fw800 drive that works well? I've been searching amazon and found LaCie and Iomega are both decent brands.

Any other recommendations?

 

[CaptainChunk]

As far as turnkey FW drives go, I like G-Tech a lot. This is their single-disk model.

But lately, I prefer building my own external FW drives because I get to choose what disk(s) go inside of the enclosure. You can get an enclosure like this OWC and add any SATA hard drive to it.