Question about a DV Editing System

[LakAttack]

So I'm getting ready to buy a DV cam (Sony TRV-38) and I'll be doing editing on my rig. It's a pretty sweet machine - P4 2.4 on an ASUS P4PE board with an 80 gig Maxtor HD (8mb cache), 512 MB Crucial pc2100, and ti4200 128. So I have a question for some people who do this. What is money better spent: getting another 512 of ram or another 80 gig HD? Will the ram increase performance enough to be worth it, or will I run out of that 80 gigs too fast? Oh - I'll be using Premeire and maybe After Effects.

Thanks!

 

[pulse8]

Get the second 80GB drive because another 512MB won't help as much as the disk space will. It's a rule of thumb with video editing that you never capture on your boot drive. It's possible to do so, but it's just not a good idea. The second 80GB drive will hold about 6 hours of DV footage and should be enough to do a lot of different projects.

 

[oldfart]

BOTH . It depends on what you are doing. 80 Gig is pretty good really. 1Hr of DV is 13 Gig. That leaves plenty of space for the converted MPEG2 (I assume you will render to MPEG2 for DVD or (S)VCD). The extra ram speeds up encoding time. I have one 120 Gig drive that I use for everything. I've never had an issue.

 

[LakAttack]

Thanks for the help, guys. Followup question though. Pulse8 - you say not to capture onto the boot drive. Does that mean I shouldn't capture to that hard drive even if it is partitioned? I have a 15 gig partition that I'm running the OS and programs from, and the rest is partitioned for file storage. So would it be ok to capture to the file partition? Looking at the HotDeals though, I think I'll try to do both, at least in the next few months.

 

[pulse8]

It's generally best to do it on a seperate drive entirely. It used to be an issue with speed, but for DV editing, you can do both on the same drive without a problem.

Part of the reson that this is still a good thing to do is that any information on the main drive like project files and backups of those files are on the main drive and if something goes wrong with it because of the stress caused by using it as a video drive, you'd have no project file and no media files.

If you're capturing from a tape, the media files can always be replaced if you have a batch capture list in Premiere. The project files are a lot harder to get back if the drive dies.

 

[AluminumStudios]

Digital video eats space like made and you want high performance (ie - not your same physical boot drive because the drive would be interrupted each time Windows tried to read or write to the drive for it's normal functions.)

You only need more RAM if you are going to be doing video compositing with a package like AfterEffects which eats memory like you wouldn't beleive. Most non-linear editors are totally happy in 512 megs of RAM.

 

[slackerinabox]

GET THE HARD DRIVE.. I thought 80 gigs would be fine until my system froze on me during a capture and windows popped up with :"insufficient disk space".. or get a mac like i did!

 

[LakAttack]

Thanks for the comments everyone. It looks like Hard Drive wins out for now.

 

[oldfart]

I've captured over 60 hrs of DV video on my single 120 Gig HD system (not all at once!) . Never had a single issue with slowdowns, lockups or what not. Never dropped a single frame either. DV only needs 13 Gig for 1 Hr. Unless you plan on capturing several tapes at once, 80 Gig of storage is OK. While capturing, your drive needs to be able to sustain a whopping 4 MB/sec. That is ~ 10% of the speed of a modern day drive.