Scratch disk for my new iMac?

[CP450]

I'm a new Mac user and I plan on doing some video and photo editing. Nothing professional, simply working with vacation photos and video. I plan on purchasing an HD camcorder later this year to replace my current one. My iMac has a 1TB internal drive and I plan on using a 1TB GTech drive for back-up (getting some help on this in another forum). Would it be beneficial to use a scratch disk for editing?

Any other tips for a newcomer to both the Mac and to video editing are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[-DH]

Would it be beneficial to use a scratch disk for editing?

Yes, but it really depends on which program you plan to use for video editing. For FCE or FCP, then yes, having a drive just for media and renders separate from the boot drive is essential to good performance.

-DH

 

[CP450]

I'll be using FCE...

Any thoughts on a size or a particular drive? Thanks.

 

[Davowade]

It all depends on what you think you will need. Always buy more storage, in my experience you run out easily. Also when hard drives get fuller they read slower from the outside of the disk which is not good for video.
Seagate ES series drives are good (albeit more expensive) due to their ability to run 24/7 in server environments. This is what I am looking to get in the next few weeks.

Work out your requirements in terms of capacity and what you can afford, and maybe spend a little extra if you can. Personally I am looking in the 2TB range for my home setup.

 

[ChrisA]

I'm a new Mac user and I plan on doing some video and photo editing. Nothing professional, simply working with vacation photos and video. I plan on purchasing an HD camcorder later this year to replace my current one. My iMac has a 1TB internal drive and I plan on using a 1TB GTech drive for back-up (getting some help on this in another forum). Would it be beneficial to use a scratch disk for editing?

Any other tips for a newcomer to both the Mac and to video editing are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

First off, get a camera that uses TAPE. Anyone who is thinking about editing should be shooting tape.

If yo are asking about a "scratch disk" that I assume you are using Final Cut Express or Pro. The term does not apply ti iMove.

Do you need a scratch disk for editing? The whole point of "scratch disk" is that it is just that. When you dump your tape to the scratch disk those video files are just temporary work files that you can delete at any time. It is not data that you care about. Not needing to care about it means you can take advantage of a "RAID 0" device that stripes your data. You will get twice the speed and one half the reliability. You would NOT want to put important data on a striped raid-0 but video scratch files can go there.

The question is do you do enough editing to justify the cost? If it is vacation footage then I assume this is not a huge amount of data, it's not like you will be shooting hours of footage every week. Figure 8GB per hour. Will you shoot 20 hours of video on your vacation? That is more than most people shoot. It would not fill a 200GB drive. So the smallest raid-0 firewire-800 disk arry would work for you.

If you are not going to buy an ultra fast disk and you have plenty of space on existing drives you may as well use them

 

[CP450]

Thanks for the help, guys

I appreciate the assistance.