external drive

Need some help, I'm relatively new to FCP

I run FCP5 on a Powerbook G4 - 80 gigs. Currently, a have approx 35 gigs of space. I'm now working on a documentary but I have up to 90 minutes of footage. Going off of the 1 gig/minute, I obivously need more space. Is it as simple as hooking up to an external drive to allow me to capture and store greater then the 80 gigs on the powerbook.

It's a poor idea to connect a FireWire drive and a capture device to the same FireWire port at the same time, so the way out is to buy a PCCard FireWire adapter and put the external hard drive on that and the capture device on the built-in.

Past that, we try to steer people away from LaCie drives and Western Digital. Both of those have had ratty reputations for whatever reasons. Terrible reputations here on the forum.

An Oxford 911 or later chipset and at least a 7500 rotation speed should do it.

Because of the laptop thing, you have effectively talked yourself out of the larger, faster and more exotic options--RAID, etc--but that should be good for a relatively small, simple production.

Others will chime in with favorite makers, I have several Seagates and I've been happy.

When you get a new drive, make sure it's formatted MacOSX Extended, Non-Journaled. Reformat if you have to. That's important.

Do Not Buy a USB drive.

I think that covers it.

Koz



Post Edited (04-27-06 09:14)

<<Going off of the 1 gig/minute,...>>

Where did you get that figure? For DV, it's more like 13 GB/hr, so 90 minutes of DV will take about 20 GB. However, that doesn't mean you're good to go with your internal drive. You never want to fill a drive more than 90%, especially the boot drive, and your renders will eat up a lot of space beyond that 20 GB in no time. And trying to service both the software and the media on the same drive is never a good idea.

So an external drive is still the way to go. I use a PB with a 60 GB internal drive, with several LaCie (there, I said it!) drives connected, even daisy-chained with my camera, with good results. As Koz warns you, and many others will, this is not going to necessarily work well for you, mostly due to how the stars are arranged in your neighborhood. But firewire drives are about the only choice you have when you use a PowerBook, so go for it.

I believe the correct drive speed minimum is 7200 RPM, not 7500. Many external drives come with choice of FW or USB connections, alway use firewire, USB can't keep up with video. And follow the rest of Koz's advice.

Scott

i diasychain a camera and external firewire drive to the built in fw port on my old 1.0 17" powerbook all the time and ive had very few if any issues at all. i dont really know why all these people always say you have to have an external firewire card...???

and i swear by promax drives. anytime ive ventured away from them, ive had problems...

<<<and i swear by promax drives.>>>

That's the one I couldn't think of.

What he said.

<<<ive had very few if any issues>>>

We didn't say it wouldn't work. We said it might be unstable and Apple agrees with that.

We tend to like uncontitionally stable systems and you can get that with either a FireWire card for your deskside or a FireWire PCCard for your laptop.

Or you can take your chances with Daisy Chain. Many people do. You need to know that if you do it this way, the most likely time to have failures is right as you're delivering to a client. That's when the drives are the most full and most likely to have problems.

It waits until you're not looking and then, blammo.

"...and it's dropping frames as I lay the show off to tape...."

Koz

the reason that i soo aressively support promax is that way back in FCP version 1.x (i was a tried and true media100 guy back then) i was about to buy a new media100 system when my sales guy at promax told me about this crazy new app from apple called FINAL CUT PRO. it was designed such that i didnt need the big $6000+ SCSI drive arrays. it would work on little $500 fire wire drives. so, all in, with CPU, monitors, drives and audio gear it would come to about $15k.

i told him that was insane and there was no way it would work. he said, "ok, buy the FCP system, and if it doesnt work for you, you can send it back and i'll sell you your $40k media100 system".

well, that was 1999 ish and i havent looked back. mac CPU (tower or powerbook) > rear firewire port > promax firewire drive(s) > camera/deck = few if any problems to speak of in nearly 7 years. have run SEVERAL G3, G4 (towers and powerbooks), G5. the ONLY constant in my arsenal has been promax firewire drives.

i gotta think that might have something to do with it.

wayne,

Sooooooo- ProMax Firewire drives are you lucky charm - eh?

I still assert there is no magic with ProMax Firewire drives. Firewire drives are ALL made of the same pieces. YaDa-YaDA!

While I commend your loyalty to a companiy as fine as ProMax, there are OTHER Firewire drives that work (just not LaCie)

> I still assert there is no magic with ProMax Firewire drives. Firewire drives
> are ALL made of the same pieces. YaDa-YaDA!
> While I commend your loyalty to a companiy as fine as ProMax, there are
> OTHER Firewire drives that work (just not LaCie)

Hey, just because Promax has the magic for Wayne and me doesn't mean other drives can't, right? I used a Seagate on an L.A./San Francisco job (had to bring a laptop and drive to an agency with the producer and director) and it worked very well, though long-term observation is what I'll need to build up more faith in this brand.

In the meantime, people continue to buy Lacies...I have two hunks of ugly metal 500GB drives around my system right now and one of them's already giving me trouble mounting. It's been a week since I've had them! I wish the producer/director could've asked me or done research before buying her equipment.

>>>>In the meantime, people continue to buy Lacies<<<<<
Maybe that's because Apple pushes them in their "Mac Stores". I had a long discussion with a clerk at our local store and he adamamently(sic) defended the Lacie drives. I recently purchased a 250 gig, just for backup, before I read all the negative comments about them. So far, however, it has worked flawlessly in that capacity...boots right up when I need to retrieve clips. Barry

<<<When you get a new drive, make sure it's formatted MacOSX Extended, Non-Journaled. Reformat if you have to. That's important.>>>

Could someone explain the steps in formatting a new firewire drive? (latest FCP and G5 dual). I just exceeded my techno-boundaries by putting a Seagate drive into a firewire Macally case. When I went to format the drive, as per things I've read here, it took me a while to figure out how to do it with Disk Utilities.

It now starts up OK and I've put media files on it so all seems fine, but I still haven't figured out this thing about unjournaled vs journaled.

Thanks ....