Render and Burn

[cowdog77]

"So I would say try rendering to and external hard drive."
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Good tip, I've had better results burning to a different drive. (Adobe Premiere Elements)

 

[Tigerman]

Data transfers should indeed be done to different disks as transferring data to and from harddrives is generally a bottleneck. If you can have the two disks on different controllers, thats even better..

 

[LowVizWiz]

Data transfers should indeed be done to different disks as transferring data to and from harddrives is generally a bottleneck. If you can have the two disks on different controllers, thats even better..

Uh? I don't mean to criticize you, but your 2 statements contradict each other. Data transfers are indeed bottlenecks, so how does transferring to a second disk on a second controller help the situation? Could you explain what you mean?

You should have at least 2 disks, 3 or more if possible. 1 system/apps disk and 1 disk for digitizing/scratch disk. If possible a sata raid array for digitizing is desirable.

Also rendering to an external is not recommended for a couple of reasons:

1. Attempting to save to a different drive = the bottlenecks that Tigerman was referring to.
2. Usually, externals are on a slower USB or Firewire bus than your internal disks.

Unless you're talking about transferring from on daisy-chained firewire disk to another. And the source disks is where your digitized material resides.

I hope this helps.
Wys

 

[Tigerman]

Why are they contradictions?
Theres a limit to how much data a drive can read and write every second and there is a limit to how much data a IDE/SATA/SCSI controller can handle each second..

If you need to read and write more data per second than the single drive can handle, you will do the job faster reading by one drive and writing to a second as read dont have to wait for write or the opposite.

 

[LowVizWiz]

Try duplicating a file vs. doing a copy to a different disk of the same file and time which is faster.
That's the oversimplified answer.

 

[Tigerman]

Try duplicating a file vs. doing a copy to a different disk of the same file and time which is faster.
That's the oversimplified answer.

Try moving one file from a folder on a drive to another folder on the same drive and itll be even faster than making a copy. Copying a file internally on a harddrive and retrieving it, then processing it in the CPU and write a new file is not quite the same.

 

[LowVizWiz]

Like I said, it's an oversimplified answer, but the same principle! Even writing the processed data to the same disk will be faster than writing to a separate disk. You're adding more overhead to the system when you go to a separate disk.

It's not a big deal, none of this is helping the OP finish his project faster =)

 

[bfisher]

Hi guys, glad to see the reponses so far. Just want to sa that I appreciate all the good intentions, but some of the jargon is beyond my puter understanding to date. Keep it up, though. I'm willing to learn.

So what's the consensus here. Get an external hard drive? I think I need that for storing the videos anyway. I've got a 500G right now and it's got almost 100G of music on it right now. Music just for doing underwater video and photo. I'm thinking about a 750G external.

Presently I've got another video rendering as I write this. It's about 33 minutes so let's see how long this one takes. One thing I have learned is to press the burn icon and then go watch TV till I go to bed. Should be done by morning I hope.

I've learned a ton over the last few month, being completely new to video of any sort. I'm gettin ready to pack the bags and head for Bonaire next month and get some new footage. I was in Bonaire this past March and have done and redone the video I had from that, my second video trip. I think it's in it's 7th edition. I need some new scenes.

Keep up the talk. I'll be checking back tomorrow.

 

[Rig Magician]

Like I was saying I have seen my videos render faster to and external hard drive. Now if you get one that will hook up Via firewire that would be best but USB will work also.

 

[bfisher]

I just did my Curacao video last night and it took 5 hours. Pretty normal I'd guess. Wonder why things vary so much. Have to do more work on this thing. Unfortunately what I see on the monitor is not what I get all the time. Things are too bright, but at least there is no blue, except for the water in the background. Changed the music, too. New version is burning as we speak.

OK, so I'm looking at external hard drives, at least 500G and 7200RPM. Price range is from $129 to $500 from Tiger Direct. Couple more questions. I would definitely go FireWire, but does memory cache matter all that much? What's the dif between 8MB and 16MB.

Secondly,I have a spare bay. Should I go internal? Obviously there is no FireWire for internals. Am I right? Which would be faster?

Any other ideas?