Hard Drive fill indicator

[Chet]

Hi
I started doing nle about a year ago with Avid Cinema. I started using MSP 5 shortly after and haven't gone back to Avid. One thing I liked about Avid Cinema was that it told me how much hard drive space I used while capturing. I haven't found as good an indicator in MSP 5. Am I missing something. I'm looking for kb and mb not frames and seconds. I wonder if there is something I can confiure and if not can you tell me how you determine how much drive space is left while in the middle of a capture session?

Thanks
Chet

[DrMordrid]

Use your calculator and the better editor.

Check the free capacity of your drive in megs BEFORE you start capturing.

Now divide by 190 and you will get how many minutes of capture you can do before the drive fills up at 704x480 @6.6:1 (3.102 megs/sec). This gives a safety margin since 3.102 megs/sec is actually only 186.12 megs/minute.

To calculate for another rez use this:

megs/sec X 60 = megs/minute.

Since many capture programs allow you to set a capture time limit you don't even have to be there to stop it. The extra can be clipped by using mark-in/mark-out in the editor.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 27 December 1999).]

[Chet]

Thanks Doc
I was afraid using my calculator was going to be the answer but I appreciate your help with the figures. I'm not going back to Avid Cinema and I don't have to ask your opinion of it. I've read enough of your posts and your opinion is clear. I'm always a bit leary of buying a product with the word Pro attached. There's always something that is more work than it should be but the other bells and wistles make it worth the extra effort.

I've got another question from your answer. I'm using a 17 gig hard drive partitioned into 3 drives. I guess I'm lucky because many people are getting alot of drop frames with one drive but I get none. This is the result of help from you and others on this group over the last year and I'm not changing a thing. My question is about the data transfer rate. Hard drive benchmark is reporting 7.84 mb/s on my E drive which is my 13 gig partition. My question is, is hard drive bench mark accurate and if so can I calculate a ratio based on the data you've given me. Thanks for the continued help.

Chet

[dchip]

I almost returned my G200TV when the Matrox HDD benchmark over and over again reported my HDD as 10-11 MB/sec. I learned that the benchmark is a simple little read-write test. It has nothing to do with the true specs for an particular drive. IOW, it does not push the drive to the drives full capability. Your 7.84 MB/sec is very nice which is the main reason you're not dropping any frames. As for using that benchmark as a timer, no. It would not be reliable. The MB/sec will vary by individual job or movie and will even vary within a job as it flows. BTW, I was upset with Matrox at first because it did not report my drive as being 66 MB/sec, which is the sustained transfer capability stated by the hard drive manufacturer. We live and learn.

[DrMordrid]

Yeah, the HDBenchmark program is a bit whacked. Unfortunately you have to run it go get numbers into the registry so as to access the higher capture settings.

This can be a problem if HDBenchmark is wrong to the low side, which can happen. Then it locks the higher settings out unless you change the registry entries.

I use the professional version of SiSofts SANDRA benchmark program. There is also a shareware version that has a built in drive benchmark that works nicely. Don't pay attentiton to the up-front figure it reports as that is a composite figure, as is true with most HD benchmark programs.

Most good benchmarks give a detailed result list which should include the sustained sequential read and write speeds (SSR and SSW). These are more pertinent to capture and playback performance.

Dr. Mordrid




[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 28 December 1999).]

[Chet]

Thanks Guys
I'll use the calcs that Doc gave me to approximate the amount of drive I'm using and not pay too much attention to the HD benchmark and just consider myself lucky that I'm not dropping frames. It wasn't that way in the begining. I was on here dropping frames all over the place and trying things the the group was suggesting and one day the drop frames stopped and I've been afraid to change drivers and video tools ever since.
dchip
One of the things that drove me nuts when I was buying my my Matrox Marvel and a new computer a year ago was that Matrox was saying that a mode 4 drive or a scsi drive was required. I read everything I could about drives and couldn't find a hard drive manufacturer that had a mode 4 udma 66 drive available at that time. Maybe I didn't interpret everything correctly but even my computer manufacturer didn't know all of what I was talking about. Luckily I'm a good listener and I found this group because everything worked out and most of the time I can use this system and not fight with it.

Thanks again. I've got a few more pages to print and put in my Matrox/Ulead notebook.

Chet