Super 8 Computer Editing Help

[christoph]

Our macs in the lab use Premiere, and it crashed on any capture when the temp files was set to a locked folder (in the applications/premiere folder). I had the Alpha Geek change the temp folder (scratchpad) to the users/premier_temp folder, then Premiere worked fine. I 2nd that two drives are better than one, one for apps, one for data. We also produced a trick that a reboot disables Norton AV and other network background tasks.

imo, this myth with "capture to an extra drive" is really from the old days of NLE and doesn't really apply anymore if you work on a reasonably fast machine and use DV compression. sure, it's nice to use a different partition to keep things organised and if you even have a second drive, more power to you (pun intended).

but the above poblems are not realated to that at all, but rather to:

1. trying to capture to a locked folder - this will fail on any disk, using any program.
2. running norton AV (or disk doctor for that matter)
3. using premiere (probably version 5.0... arrgh ;)

++ christoph ++

[crimsonson]

Actually it still applies very much - far from being a myth.
If you understand how FCP captures you would want it to be a seperate drive.
When capturing, FCP automatically allocates empty drive space prior to capture. The amount is in direct proportion to you I/O point and/or your capture duration limit settings.

IF you crash during capture [not rare] this section of the drive is often unuseable until you repair it [DiskWarrior, FirstAid, etc].
If you can't repair it, it will cause system instability because your OS might ran in to it for paging files and other internal use.

Also, you are making your drive work at least twice as hard [thus increase chance for failure] for the system needs and FCP capture needs.
So you are also limiting the performance of the drive - not only during capture but edit, render and playback.

One internal drive is not a show stopper. It can work fine. But the point is, even for DV, dedicated media drives is best.

[christoph]

If you understand how FCP captures you would want it to be a seperate drive.

well, having four internal disks each divided in three partitions i'm a bit of a speed freak myself... i usually capture to the fastest partition of he fastest drive so i *do* understand how media files benefit from dedicated HD space... but sometimes i'll just capture to the system drive anyway with no problems whatsoever .. and this is on a single processor 1ghz G4 with normal IDE drives.
what i was trying to say is that some ppl still get tied up in dicussions about special media drives while the problem is clearly somewhere else.. as in this case in insufficient RAM (even though i bet that FCE would work with only 256MB if apple hadnt decided to pull the plug).

DV is only about 3.6MB/sec (plus some overhead) - and a reasonably modern computer should be able to read/write 15mb/sec with no problem

++ christoph ++

[super8man]

I once accidentally captured a 400-foot movie with my workprinter to the non-RAID c-drive! OOOPS. Lo and behold (special copyrighted saying for xmas) the capture was perfect. Go figure.

Still, I continue to use my "F" drive which is the Raid-0 array and it works great. So yes, take with a grain of salt what the Alpha Geeks say. At the end of the day, we are all just trying to get the job done with the resources we have at hand. If people had more $$ and more time, they woiuld spend their time on computer bulletin boards learning about the latest and greatest devices. Here? Just the basics man...Keep your eye on the ball I always say.

[mattias]

again, it's not necessary to capture to a separate drive, but it's still a good idea. simple as that. it's a myth that you *need* a separate drive, but it's also a myth that there's *no need* for one if you're useing dv.

/matt