Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

USB2.0 vs. FW400 for external drives for video editing.

iShater

iShater

macrumors 604
Original poster
Aug 13, 2002
7,027
470
Chicagoland
With all the noise of the latest MB changes, I haven't been able to see a straight answer regarding this question.

Regardless of what I replace my 12" PB with, and whether I continue using my FW miniDV camera or a newer HDD HiDef one, I still have a choice of doing the import on my iMac at home. So I can "survive" without the FW on a MacBook for doing the initial import for the video.

My concern is about the editing process. I currently use external FW400 7200RPM drives to store the video project files for editing.

If I go with a MB and USB2.0 only, will I still be able to perform that editing without issues? will the through-put and speed of the drive be bad enough compared to FW that it is not worth it?

Thank you.
 
Thanks, that covers the video import, for which I am sure FW is better.

I'm wondering if there are issues with the editing processes if your scratch/project disk is USB2.0 vs. FW.
 
I've not experienced the problems others have had with capture and editing via a USB 2.0 hard drive. I edited and captured HDV footage on a 12" Powerbook for three years without dropped frames nor significant sluggishness. I was using FCS 1. I needed to use USB because I only had 1 firewire port that I needed to connect to the camera for capture. The drive I used was OWC's 100 gb small portable drive (don't have it with me right now for the specifics)

Currently I haven't had any problems with my early 2008 MBP editing with the above equipment. (It's still only equipped with 1 FW 400 port)
 
I decided I am too much of a believer in FW to give in. I ended up ordering a last gen 15" MBP, and will be getting a Canon HV20/HV30 to replace my JVC miniDV SD camcorder.

That way I can still import via FW and can still edit on my external FW HDs.
 
So I just got a last generation Macbook because I wanted a Firewire port, but I want to also use a Firewire scratch drive.

Do you guys recommend a Firewire hub (as the linked post above seems to suggest), do you recommend daisy chaining the cam to the drive, or should I capture to the internal disk and then copy the files over to the scratch drive after capture?

I am using FCE 4.
 
USB 2.0 will work but it's more likely that you drop frames, plus it won't be able to play as many video streams at once.
 
never use usb for video editing. firewire 400 is the bare minimum. firewire 800 i use as a standard for externals. esata is even better. internals are the best though (mac pro only). NEVER use your boot drive for media.
 
slu said:
So I just got a last generation Macbook because I wanted a Firewire port, but I want to also use a Firewire scratch drive.

Do you guys recommend a Firewire hub (as the linked post above seems to suggest), do you recommend daisy chaining the cam to the drive, or should I capture to the internal disk and then copy the files over to the scratch drive after capture?

I am using FCE 4.
Click to expand...

I used to capture to the scratch FW drive directly, didn't see any issues.
 
I used a USB drive as a scratch disk for editing DV video in FCE.

For the first 5 minutes of the timeline it seemed to work fine, but as the project got longer and I started needing to access more and more data on the drive, it started to get very distinctly jerky.
 
iShater said:
I used to capture to the scratch FW drive directly, didn't see any issues.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I tried this with a small project (only about 23 total minutes of footage, about a 5 minute finished product) and it worked fine.

Hopefully I have the same success with a larger project!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back