Video editing on a 12" Pbook: need help building my setup!

[nina]

Hi, there! I'm really enjoying my new 12" Rev. C Powerbook - the possibilities of it are just starting to sink in, and I'm dying to get into serious video editing with it. The problem is, I can't quite figure out how to configure my setup. Maybe you guys can help?

I've got a windows PC with Firewire and about 80GB of free hard drive space. It also has an internal DVD-R drive installed.

I'm studying film, and for my upcoming editing courses, I'm going to have to purchase an external hard drive for non-linear editing in the school's labs. I'm thinking a Firewire drive would be great for editing video on my new Powerbook.

So, how should I go about capturing video from a miniDV camera to the external hard drive, editing it in FCP4 on the Powerbook, authoring a DVD using DVD Studio Pro 3 (also on the Powerbook), and getting the DVD image file onto the PC for burning to DVD disc? I was thinking about formatting the firewire drive as FAT32, but the <2GB file limit is not enough for a full DVD-R image file.

It'd be ideal if I could format the drive completely as HFS+, with a tiny (~10GB) NTFS partition for finished DVD images. Then I could mount the drive on the PC, copy the image file, and burn. Too bad Panter can't write NTFS (right?). Any word if this capability will come in Tiger?

Finally, any tips on the external drive? Since I've only got one Firewire port on the Powerbook, I need to daisy chain from the miniDV camera -> external drive -> Powerbook. My film prof recommended an ADS Firewire enclosure. Does anyone know if this daisy chaining will work with this make of enclosure (specifically, capturing directly from the camera to the external drive)? Also, any comments on the ADS enclosure would be welcome. I've looked at Lacie as well, and while they look great, they seem a little pricey.

Thanks for any help you can offer - sorry for the long post!

 

[omala]

There's a windows program called MacOpener that lets windows read HFS/HFS+ filesystems, which might do the trick for you - it's at http://www.dataviz.com/products/macopener/mo_macmedia.html, although they advise that it's not tested with firewire drives, so it may or may not work for you.

Is there any reason you can't just copy the files over a network? It'd be slower than just mounting the drive, obviously, but with 100BaseT it should be doable.

Meanwhile, I can't speak for DV cameras, but I've been using a firewire audio interface (presonus firestation, which is known to be a little touchy) with a firewire drive daisy chained to it with no problems on my G4 tower. As long as there's a decent controller/hub in whichever device you're chaining, I think you'd be fine. The standard advice in audio recording is get a drive with the Oxford chipset (911 for F/W 400; they've got newer chipsets out now).

 

[CitrusScent]

Why not use a network connection to transfer the files? It will be a bit slower than a fw hd, but will work great.

 

[MrBubbles]

My 2¢:

Check out OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com) for firewire drives. They have good prices and get consistently good reviews for their drives.

You could get close to the speed of a firewire drive between your mac and pc by using IP over Firewire. Basically what you would do is, on each computer, configure your firewire port as a network interface. The machines should both try to use DHCP but fail, though assuming you're using at least Win2K, that shouldn't be a problem since it auto-configures reasonably well (as does OS X). If it doesn't work right away then assign one firewire interface the address 192.168.2.1 and the other one 192.168.2.2 (hopefully those addresses won't conflict with anything else). You would then set up a network share normally, and you should be able to transfer files 4x faster than fast ethernet (I'm not sure what the overhead is like, but I've tried this between 2 macs and it's definitely fast).

How to configure a firewire port as a network interface in OS X (I don't know how to do it in Windows, but I'm told it's supported):

> Open System Preferences and click on the Network icon
> Go to Show: Network Port Configurations
> If you don't see a firewire port there, click New.... You'll get a dialog asking you which port to use and what to call it.
> Select Built-In Firewire and call it whatever you want.

After you click OK in the dialog, make sure you click the Apply Now button on the System Preferences window. The default settings are to use DHCP so you have nothing else to do assuming everything works.

 

[Spock]

I have a 60GB Hard Drive formatted in FAT32 I had no problems

 

[Finiksa]

I have a 60GB Hard Drive formatted in FAT32 I had no problems

Yes but FAT32 only supports a max 2GB file size which is useless for video editing.