Do you capture to external drives?

I read somewhere (don't remember where) that you're not supposed to capture to an external drive. Is this true?

If so, why?

I have a 400GB external Seagate drive, hooked up via USB2.



"A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh."

You want to capture to a drive that doesn't have an OS or other apps on it. Doesn't matter if its external or internal. And if its external it cant be hooked up via USB

Why not USB2? It's faster than firewire.



"A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh."

USB, while faster than firewire in some respects, doesn't have the SUSTAINED speeds that digital video needs.

And there are several types of external drive setups for use with FCP, Firewire is the most basic, and while Apple doesn't support it, nor say it is the best solution, it has worked fine for most people (including me).

We use external drives all the time for editing. External Fibrechannel Raids like the XServe or Medea, Ultra SCSI, External SATA raids...lots of options. Most of them not cheap. Firewire is the cheapest and most basic.

USB will not work for editing video. Even if it is USB 2.0

Thanks.

I believe you and am not trying to make you prove yourself, but what do you mean by "sustained speed".



"A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh."

I am not highly technical, nor do I know the exact numbers, but I do now that USB has a range that it will use...sometimes it will transfer at the low range, sometimes the high range, depending on how much system resources are available. If nothing is happening, transfer is fast, if the computer is doing something, then it will dip slower.

Firewire has a sustained thruput. Meaning that it says "no matter what, files will transfer at this speed." If may be a slower number than USB 2's, but that is because it can guarentee that speed. USB cannot.

Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Totally makes sense.



"A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh."

<<< it has worked fine for most people (including me).>>>

But not us. About once a month or so, somebody will try to take a shortcut and capture to one of the external drives. Sometime it works..........

If it does work, it only works for DV quality. Not uncompressed.

Koz

I only suggest that FW 400 drives be used for DV...nothing more.

FW800 drives...specifically the G-RAIDS are great for uncompressed 8-bit and DCVPRO HD material. 10-bit they start getting taxed. Then you consider the SATA Raids....

Hi I have a problem when I capture to an external hard drive I have a G5 my final cut is 4.5 and my external hard drive is Maxtor 170 GB 7200 rpm.
For example if I'm capturing a clip name( park ) It will created not only one quick time file in the hard drive. It created 4 or 5 file, one name Park, next name park V-1, next park V-2, etc. Only one of them open in quick time the rest if I doble clic them will give me an alert that It say Quick time can't open the file "park V-1 "It is not a file that quick time can understand (-2048 ).
If I capture the same clip in my internal hard drive It doesn't happen I try to capture to the internal hard drive and after trafer it to the external but it is imposible because it will start to transfer but at the end it will say this file can't be transfer because some of the data can't be tranfer. If any body can help me please I really appreciate it

You probably didn't format the drive properly before using it. Select it in the Finder and press APPLE-I and check its format. The drive is probably in MS-DOS or Mac OS Standard right now, with a 2GB upper limit to file sizes, which results in larger files being split into multiple dependent files with one master.

No way around this -- delete the mis-captured ones from the drive, copy everything from the external to another drive (eg. internal), re-format the external drive in Mac OS Extended using Disk Utility, then copy the files back. Next time, whenever you buy any kind of external storage, the first step has to be reformatting.

I believe that the main difference between USB and FW is that USB sends packets of information and FW streams information.

--ken