Using Final Cut with external USB 2.0 drive

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/

MtD

The generally accepted wisdom is that USB2 is not appropriate for fcp media. I've been slapped a few times by people who say they have enormous experience with usb2 drives and have never had a problem. My feeling is that if you depend on your system to make a livelihood, it's better to play it safe.

DanK wrote:

I've been using an external Firewire drive for storing my movies. Now it is full and I need to get another external drive. However the new drives I've seen tend to be only USB.

One way to "play both sides of the street" would be to write all the movies you're storing (and other non-essential data) on the FW drive to a new (hopefully much larger) USB drive.

Although it offers reasonable transfer rates, USB is an interrupt-driven architecture. This means that if there are any USB devices (printer, keyboard, mouse, who-knows-what?) on the same channel as the hard drive, that device can interrupt your block transfer of video data with a service request. This is no big deal with storage but a problem with video playback.

Systems with isolated USB controllers may be able to utilize USB for a lot of things, yours is not one of those systems.

You can have as many USB devices connected as you want; you should still be able to view movies on them.

The main reason USB isn't recommended for editing is that the USB protocol transfers data in packets (short bursts). Most editing software will 'see' the gap between those bursts of data as dropped frames. Firewire, SATA and eSATA transfers data in a sustained stream, which is what most NLE apps expect. Firewaire 800 is faster than Firewire 400 but your Mac only has one Firewire bus regardless of the number of FW ports). If a slower Firewire device is connected to the bus, all FW devices will transfer at the slower speed.

Some video formats will require specific transfer speeds (data rate), which may include a Fireware RAID or an eSATA setup. Other formats are much less demanding and using standard Firewire 4oo or 800 will suffice.

-DH

DanK wrote:

Let me make sure I understand this: If I store completed movies on the USB drive, I should have no problem viewing them, as long as I have no other external USB devices connected to the MacBook.

You can use the USB drive for archiving projects but as said before you shouldn't edit with one. While the nominal maximum speed for USB 2 and FW400 is not that far apart the two protocols work differently. USB 2 achieves the max speed in "bursts" which is not what you want for video.

DanK wrote:

However for editing movies, I should have them on either the FW drive or on the computer itself.

Is that correct? Will it work to edit movies on the FW-400 drive, or should they be on the computer itself?

While you can have the project file itself on your system drive, all the media files should be on external drives. This way your system drive gets to run the software and the external keeps the media and renders.

DanK wrote:

And if I get a new FW-800 drive, will I be able to edit movies stored on that (i.e. will I see a difference between FW-400 and FW-800?)

FW800 is definitely faster. See a comparison here: http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html

If your macbookpro has a card slot, you can get a firewire 800 card and have 2 firewire busses. You can also get an e-sata card for even better thruput.

I know they eliminated the card slot a few years ago on the macbookpro's. Not sure when.

I think the other guys pretty well answered your follow-up questions...

The bottom like is:

Always edit from two drives whenever possible.

Use ProRes422 or a similar codec for smoother editing.

USB is good for general storage but not for editing.

Keep your system and scratch (editing) drives as "clean" as possible, and make sure thay have enough free space.

Good luck!

Always edit from two drives whenever possible:

System drive = drive one. you want MacOS and FCP here.

External or second internal drive (depending on system type) = drive two. Keep your Capture Scratch and all other sources here, along with renders and such.

Keeping things separate like this keeps FCP running as it should.