[webi]

hi all,

just switched to mac to get serious about producing my own dv work to dvd.

as my beautiful new 15" pwrbk has only one hard drive (80GB) should i partition my drive to keep my video files seperate from my system (panther when it arrives in mail) and other detritus?

any advantages to leaving the drive alone, and any problems that arise from partitioning.

i'll be using fcp4 and dvd studio2.

any other tips on best practise for setting up a pwrbk for dv editing most appreciated.

thanks in advance,
webi.

[Axo1ot1]

Get an external FireWire (preferably FireWire 800) drive. Capturing video to the disk you are booting off of and running your editing software from is generally a bad call.

I'm editing 3 short films right now on a 17 inch powerbook. I got a FireWire 800 drive enclosure from WiebeTech and a 200 GB 7200 RPM hard drive with an 8 MB cache from Western Digital and made myself a nice little scratch disk. It actually runs faster than the hard drive in the computer, and I've never seen it drop frames. Partitioning is usually a bad way to go in my experience.

[nate_02]

I agree, get an external firewire drive. With small things, I will just use my one partition HD and have no problems.

[k_munic]

Originally posted by webi:
… should i partition my drive to keep my video files seperate from my system (panther when it arrives in mail) and other detritus?

any advantages to leaving the drive alone, and any problems that arise from partitioning.
…

any other tips on best practise for setting up a pwrbk for dv editing most appreciated.

…

welcome to the wonderful world of using a mac for video editing

as mentioned before:
best practice is, to use 2 hd: one for system, one for video data.

if you plan to create dvds, your system will need minimum 14G of free hd space for some "hidden", temporarly files while using iDVD(pro)! so, the system partiton needs to be BIG!

secondly: when you partion one hd into 2 (or more) parts, it has to do a lot of work, 'cause your system is doing a lot of hd work and streaming large videofiles causes also a lot of bzz-bzz and brr-brr on your hd...- better to have 2 hd! external fd cases and hd are cheap! and you will need LOTS of Gigs (i'm just doing some hobby editing - using 500Gb, for 4 projects . don't forget the grafix you will do with photoshop elements or some nice 3D titleing with cinema CE.. two "cheap" prgs i do recommend).

did i mention RAM? more RAM.... get as much as you can afford!

something silly/toys for the boys:
i like to use my shuttle pro from contour! or griffin has something similar, a "knob" for fast moving your video...

[Axo1ot1]

Originally posted by k_munic:
something silly/toys for the boys:
i like to use my shuttle pro from contour! or griffin has something similar, a "knob" for fast moving your video...

got one of these too. it's dope.