I was watching some training for FCP on Lynda.com and the trainer made it clear that he did not want us to use the boot disk as a scratch disk (not even a partition). One reason is that the bandwidth from a single drive is not enough, causing it to run slower, but he also mentions that it will almost always cause dropped frames (not just while editing-it will also so in output). If that is so then why are so many pros on Apple's site saying that they finally have the power to edit movies (FCP I would assume) on the go. I'm sure pros wouldn't want dropped frames in their movies.
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Primary disk as scratch disk. Dropped frames?
- Thread starter PkennethV
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bigbossbmb
macrumors 68000
cuz they bring a FW drive with them...
when they say they are editing 'on the go' they really mean that they can go somewhere else, sit down with a laptop and an external drive, and edit. they are not talking about editing on a bus or in a car.
when they say they are editing 'on the go' they really mean that they can go somewhere else, sit down with a laptop and an external drive, and edit. they are not talking about editing on a bus or in a car.
I don't do anything hardcore, but I've never dropped frames capturing to my primary drive.
That said, giving as much bandwidth as possible at any given time is the best thing you can do...
That said, giving as much bandwidth as possible at any given time is the best thing you can do...
bigbossbmb
macrumors 68000
i wasn't talking about bus powered drives... those are not very fast (usually small laptop drives). I was talking about 3.5" 7200 RPM drives. When they are 'editing on the go' it is them sitting down somewhere, hooking up their laptop and hard drives, and going to work.
Sounds like false information to me. I use my primary disks all the time without any problems.
killr_b
macrumors 6502a
Yeeaahh you see, the FCP manual says not to capture to your system drive. But the iMovie manual doesn't.
CanadaRAM
macrumors G5
When you have your data and your scratch on the same physical drive, the head is forced to repetively transit back and forth between the data area and the scratch area, and the time requried to do this adds to the latency of the whole system. At some point it falls over and starts dropping frames.
Here's a way to test it. Take a large folder, and Duplicate it on your hard drive (or copy it to a different partition) Time how long it takes. Now take the same folder, and copy it to a different hard drive. It'll take almost half the time - because the destination drive can write continuously and the source drive can read contiuously, without shuttling the heads back and forth.
You can also understand from this why putting the scratch on a different partition on the same drive is ineffective -- its the same physical head transiting back and forth, even in it is n different logocal partitions on the drive.
So: Dividing highly alternating tasks between different physical drives is a primary strategy for improving performance, moreso than RAID or any other strategy.
Here's a way to test it. Take a large folder, and Duplicate it on your hard drive (or copy it to a different partition) Time how long it takes. Now take the same folder, and copy it to a different hard drive. It'll take almost half the time - because the destination drive can write continuously and the source drive can read contiuously, without shuttling the heads back and forth.
You can also understand from this why putting the scratch on a different partition on the same drive is ineffective -- its the same physical head transiting back and forth, even in it is n different logocal partitions on the drive.
So: Dividing highly alternating tasks between different physical drives is a primary strategy for improving performance, moreso than RAID or any other strategy.
Not to mention that this constant degree of physical work on the heads and disks themselves increases the odds of physical malfunction and wear, and, in my experience, opens your primary drive to all sorts of other file corruptions in the system.
Father Jack
macrumors 68020
If you can, use a different hard drive as the scratch disk. It is more efficient for Photoshop and Final Cut.
FJ
FJ
evil_santa
macrumors 6502a
I use my MacBook & a Lacie FW pocketdrive to edit with on my Train journy into work 😀 the only down side is its a bit hard on the batterys.
Works ok, but im not runnig full DV
Works ok, but im not runnig full DV