would it be worth it to get a raid for this??

[Smokey0066]

well i'm gonna try to do some video editing with some video from the last fam vacation. theres about 7hrs+ in mini dv tapes. anyways i wanna try to do this in as large chunks as possible. i know it'll be near impossible for me to unload 7hrs onto my hd but say 2x 60gig raid? would that be a nice start to edit this videO?

i'd be working on it with a 1gig tbird with 512 ram.

what would be my best bet for putting this vacation video together?

thanks

 

[CZroe]

No need for ATA100 hardware RAID controllers, what you should be looking for is the SUStAINED transfer rates of the 2 drives. Buy a cheap ($15-$20) Promise Ultra66 card (ATA66 controller) & convert it to a FastTrack66 (RAID card) using the EXTREMELY easy resistor + BIOS flash modification. If you plan on using the IBM 60GXP series drives (The FASTEST 60GB drives available) plan on buying 4! They're too unreliable. One is VERY likely to fail & in a 2x60GB RAID you loose an aweful lot So go with RAID 0+1 (Stripping & Mirroring) if that's what you need. The Promise controller's ATA66 interface is well above the sustained transfer rates of any IDE drive currently, & it's software hit on the CPU isn't anywhere near the same hit that the drive bottleneck would be If you aren't going to store the data for long (Just long enough to make the video) then a 2x60GB IBM 60GXP RAID could probably be relied upon during the project. Just make sure to use them independantly when you are through if you don't want to loose whatever takes that much space and make sure you don't erase our DV tapes until you are sure you won't have to start over.

 

[rbV5]

Since it's mini DV, won't you use firewire and bing it in digital? You'll only need 4-5MB/sec sustained transfer rate so any udma ide drives will work great, look for some killer deals on 5400 drives, you need storage, not so much speed and those 5400's are cheap. Get a combo like DV.Now.AV that bundles with Premiere(this one comes with Premiere 5.1 upgrade to 6.0 for $149 more) or similar, or look at the ATI DVWonder, $49 and it comes with VideoStudio 5! (it aint no Premiere, but plenty capable once you get used to the odd interface/workflow) You can't go wrong with that package.

Also, you'll want win2k/XP and at least a NTFS partition for working with those large files.

 

[CZroe]

It's the actual editing that requires it. That much uncompressed footage takes loads of space & transfer rates are the most important factor. Real-time editing of compressed video is damn near impossible!