[Macola]

I've seen recommendations on various sites (including Apple TILs) about having only one device on a Firewire bus when transferring or editing DV. Since I use iMovie on my TiBook, I have little choice except to use an external Firewire drive and connect my camcorder to it. I recently had an external FW drive die (Maxtor 40G) and although I think it's just Maxtor's crappy chipset, I'd like to hear from others on this issue. Will I ruin my external FW drive by having another device on the bus while editing?

Originally posted by Macola:
<STRONG>I've seen recommendations on various sites (including Apple TILs) about having only one device on a Firewire bus when transferring or editing DV. Since I use iMovie on my TiBook, I have little choice except to use an external Firewire drive and connect my camcorder to it. I recently had an external FW drive die (Maxtor 40G) and although I think it's just Maxtor's crappy chipset, I'd like to hear from others on this issue. Will I ruin my external FW drive by having another device on the bus while editing?</STRONG>

last week I used iMovie to capture from a firewire device daisy-chained to my maxtor 40GB drive, and it all turned out fine (actually now that I think about it, there was a whine in the sound track and I had to capture the sound again later)

[Macola]

Originally posted by &lt;HEAD&gt;:
<STRONG>
last week I used iMovie to capture from a firewire device daisy-chained to my maxtor 40GB drive, and it all turned out fine (actually now that I think about it, there was a whine in the sound track and I had to capture the sound again later)</STRONG>

Did you experience any freeze-ups or the infamous "red light" issue with the drive? My original Maxtor had a lot of problems,and my replacement drive finally died with the same symptoms. No more Maxtors for me...

[Nephron]

Hiya,

I recently used an iBook (Dual USB with 320 MB RAM) to capture a bunch of video. Because of the small internal drive (10 GB), I was using a LaCie PocketDrive (30 GB). With the camera plugged into the drive, iMovie and FCP 2.0 didn't capture well under OS X.0 (lot's of dropped frames). I had to plug the camera into the computer, capture a bit of video, then unplug the camera, plug in the external drive and transfer the files .... grrrr.

Recently I tried again with FCP 3.0 and OS X.1.2. I plugged the camera into the drive and the drive into the computer. Wouldn't you know ... 20 GB of video captured and not one dropped frame. Along the way I had expanded the RAM on the computer from 192 to 320 MB. I don't know if it was the RAM upgrade, the OS X update, or the upgrade to FCP 3.0 that did the trick, but capturing directly to the external drive now works very nicely.

I was surprised that this works, as the LaCie has a slow spindle speed, and the iBook is fairly minimal hardware for FCP 3.

Hope this helps,
Cheers

[lucylawless]

Originally posted by Macola:
<STRONG>

Did you experience any freeze-ups or the infamous "red light" issue with the drive? My original Maxtor had a lot of problems,and my replacement drive finally died with the same symptoms. No more Maxtors for me...</STRONG>

nope, I've had not one problem with my maxtor, and I've had it for about 9 months, although about 2 weeks ago was the first time I'd backed up and reinitialized (it's been mostly for backup, not a lot of read/write).

this story sounds like my issue with QPS and their cd burners. They cost about 10 percent less than the competition, but about 10 percent of their stock is lemons. It's a gamble

edit: oh yeah, that HEAD person was me, I just didn't sign in before

[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: lucylawless ]