Announcement

**Sciascia** · 24 March 2002, 15:52

If you are using HW compression (MJPEG) then you don't really need to worry about speed so much. The only time you need mega throughput on your capture drive is when you are doing uncompressed captures. Those really need some bandwidth. Any good sized Ultra 100 drive will do very well with plenty of throughput to spare. Even an Ultra 66 would suffice. Of course ideally it would be a drive seperate from your system drive, mainly for capturing video. If you raelly feel like you need the best, then try a RAID controller like the one from Promise. They are not too expensive and you can get 2 cheap ultra 100 drives, stripe them and you have twice the bandwidth and size. They scream, I have been using them for some time and can capture uncompressed video all day long. MJPEG is really not even an issue with that much speed.

I am a big WD fan too!, they work great and have never failed me yet. God prices and great diagnostic discs to let you see if they are actually enabled for the higher UltraPIO modes. IBM's are nice, but tend to be more expensive for some reason. They don't even sell them locally because of the price difference vs. actual performance.

**Hpar_** · 24 March 2002, 17:10

ahhh, cool. someone said wd has a special drive out now thats got 8megs of cache or something crazy. ok. since you are a western digital person, which disk do you recommend from them? best bang for the bux of course and the largest capacity drive for best price etc... I cannot see why to capture uncompressed video. mjpeg seems to really be just fine for what I want to do. I just like to archive shows and stuff from the tv into mpeg1. mpeg2 seems to be entirely too much trouble since my card captures at the propriatary 704x480mjpeg and you have to use virtual dub to do all this resizing etc for that reason. thanks again and I will keep an eye on this forum for the next couple of hours.

here is the link to the special edition wd drive:

http://store.westerndigital.com/product.asp?sku=1885475

thanks.

**Sciascia** · 24 March 2002, 19:56

I am still using a pair of 40G WD drives that were the biggest ones out there at the time. Any thing that gives you the most bang for the buck is fine. They are just good old Ultra100 drives, nothing special, just 7200 RPM ones. That 8M of cache is not necessary since a lot of people disable HD caching anyway. If that buffer fills up and then the platters have to start writing that information, plus the incoming, it could cause problems. Of course hat is generally with the RAM and the swap file, but same basic principle. I want my drives to start writing as soon as I hit the capture button. Like I said, MJPEG is not bandwidth intensive at all. It isn't CPU intensive either since you are using HW compression. If you have a fairly clean signal you shoud be set. Space is the only issue that you should hit. A nice big drive should make you very happy.

**Brian Ellis** · 24 March 2002, 20:30

In an Easter Bunny spending spree, I bought a pair of Maxtor 60 Gb drives with 2 Mb buffer and 7200 rpm (from Office Depot) and a RAID striper from Promise (as well as a DVD burner) and I can't wait to get home to see what they can do. With 120 Gb of fast drive space, I guess that will do everything I'm likely to need for a few days. As I haven't tried them yet, I can't report on my satisfaction or lack thereof, but a similar question in another forum suggested that Maxtor was extremely good fo video work.

**Frank Marshall** · 24 March 2002, 23:34

Here's a hard drive-specific website that should help - heaps of information and comparisons:

Home

http://www.storagereview.com/

StorageReview.com is a world leading independent storage authority. While storage reviews is in the name, we look at the entire IT stack.

I use a 7200rpm, 40gig WD (WD400BB) video scratch disk alongside a 5400rpm, 13gig system disk. A lot of folks here use Maxtors and claim their after-sales service is outstanding. I therefore recommend you also do a search of the posts here on the topic of hard drives.

Cheers...

Frank

**landrover** · 25 March 2002, 02:28

There's a lot of fuzz 'n buzz about 7200rpm hard drives for video capturing. In my opinion the main difference is that they produce more noise and heat and give too little advantage in performance.
That's why use a 80gig Maxtor for capturing. With writing speed at about 19Mb p. second I can capture with virtuall every codec I wish, only uncompressed video will be difficut in full res. But hell, why would you want uncompressed video. I don't even use it on the Avid Media Composer. And should you want it anyway, you could set up a raid0 system on two 5400rpm drives, which would give more than adequate performance.

landrover

**Sciascia** · 25 March 2002, 05:35

Originally posted by landrover
There's a lot of fuzz 'n buzz about 7200rpm hard drives for video capturing. In my opinion the main difference is that they produce more noise and heat and give too little advantage in performance.
That's why use a 80gig Maxtor for capturing. With writing speed at about 19Mb p. second I can capture with virtuall every codec I wish, only uncompressed video will be difficut in full res. But hell, why would you want uncompressed video. I don't even use it on the Avid Media Composer. And should you want it anyway, you could set up a raid0 system on two 5400rpm drives, which would give more than adequate performance.

landrover

How do you like the Media Composer? I haven't messed with one for almost 10 years now! We are running 4 XpressNT systems with a 500G Unity server right now, but I leave this week for a new job that is running the Mac based Newscutter and Media Composer. It has been a long time and I am a little worried about my Mac skills. Anything that I should be aware of?

**landrover** · 25 March 2002, 06:43

I really love working with Media Composer (as a matter of fact I'm sitting behind the rig typing this message while Media Composer is batch-capturing).
We've had this thing for about a year now and it's the first and only NLE set we have (well, our graphics dept. has Matrox Digisuite). The rest is linear Betacam SX and Digital Betacam.
I really love the set and the interface. A bit less happy though with the hardware, because we lost the scsi controller twice in one year, and the 3D-board once. B.t.w, this one is a Media Composer 10.1, running on NT4, so I really can't say anything about the Mac version. Right now we are considering upgrading to version 11, which is made for Win2K, plus I'm trying to convince my superiors to get the Ultimatte plugin, which provides keying at it's very best.
Had to get used to working with Avid in the beginning, because video and audio are not locked by default, as in Premiere or MSP.

How's Theatre Mode on the AIW 8500? I'm very curious if it beats or equals DVDMax.

take care

landrover

**KuroNeko** · 25 March 2002, 11:25

Don't be confused by the U-Ata66-100-133 designations. They're of no importance at all. Even the latest HDs are not maxed out by the U-ATA66 specification, so just watch the physical specs of the drive itself (access time, though not very imporant for video capture, min and max speed for continuous transfer rate) - as someone already suggested, www.storagereview.com is a good site.

Storage Review had some bad times though and their database may not be complete. But give it a try.

Stay away from IBMs. THey had horrible retrun rates on the GPX series, and from all the noise, the current series are still not reliable. IBM's way of dealing with this is trying to keep quiet and hope it goes away, so best advice to customers is to let IBM go away and not buy their HDs.

The fastest Western Digitals should be the 800BB (2 platter design, 40Gigs per platter) and the 120BB (3 platter). Good, cool, quit reliable. Maxtor's offerings are supposed to be good too, but I have had bad experiences with Maxtor way back, and somehow I never got to try their modern drives.

The 8MB buffer would be the JB versions of Western's top drives. They're good for work that has lots of accesses in a short time. Server work, some desktop work. But no difference with 2 MB buffer drives for video capture, where it's not access time but sustained transfer rate that counts. So you can take the cheaper 2MB versions for capture work without any fear of losing speed.

Samsung's an up and coming power, they just announced the next gen drives before any other brand, and they've been rather consistent in good performance and reliability reports

Neko

**Sciascia** · 25 March 2002, 11:25

As soon as we get all of our external suspenses met we are going to spend some time and get our AVIDs updated and run Win2k as well. We really don't have any major problems, just right now we are using a Vixel switch for the copper fibre (don't ask, I know it is a strange term) and it seems to be a bottle neck if all 4 are running full tilt. We are going true optical fiber shortly and get a new switch. I don't think that is the problem, I believe it is the Unity itself, even though they are a lot of fast SCSI drives in a RAID5 config, that is where the bottleneck is more likely, not a 100M switch in my opinion. And the Unity server itself is pathetic, just a PIII 450 with about 768M of RAM. The mouse is really jumpy and it takes forever to open up an app. It is really overworked for its class. That is another project that I am going to miss out on. Ultimatte is nice, we pretty much have the full plugin suite, anything you can imagine, though most of them are not used. Boris Red, Commotion, Ultimatte, IceFX, and a bunch of other crap. The really exciting part is that we just went from Betacam to the new digital packs by Ikegami. They seem to work pretty well, though we are still in the phase in period. No more Betacams will lighten my workload considerably since most of these machines are in the 10-12 year old range. Great decks, just a little past the overhaul point.

The 8500DV theater mode is coming along alright, but it really is not for editing like the DVDMax and MSP6 combo. It seems to make the PC monitor flash while it initializes and it does not stay open when you stop or pause. It seems to do it's best with the DVD player and when playing a clip in WM player or the ATI file player. Strange thing that I did notice is that if you play back a DV file in an editing app it seems to work...almost. It is coming along, but we know that Matrox is the king of dualhead and DVDMax.

I am really close to finding a method for capturing 100% compliant DVD format though, maybe just a quick remux or something through another app and it may be allright. Seems tro be a closed GOP header issue. The MPEG2 capture quality is astounding. I can't believe how good it looks. Much better than anything that I did with my old Marvel in MJPEG or HUFF and then fed to any other encoder. I guess the one less step of encoding makes the difference. It is also a lot faster to get a project done. Editing sucks though, I can't seem to find a true MPEG2 editor that does not try to re-encode the whole file. Another area to look into when I get some time.

**Hpar_** · 25 March 2002, 13:45

Sciascia:

"Editing sucks though, I can't seem to find a true MPEG2 editor that does not try to re-encode the whole file. Another area to look into when I get some time."

have you tried M2-editPro?

let me know. I can hook that up for you to test.

also, about this 120gig hd thing, I have narrowed it down to the wd1200bb(2meg "standard" version) or the wd1200jb(8meg "special edition" version).

someone help me decide please. thanks.

**dsp** · 25 March 2002, 17:22

Hpar_,

Storagereview shows that the 8MB WD is slightly faster and cooler than the 2MB version. So if the price is fairly similar, I'd go with the 8MB version, though it might not do much for video capturing.

dsp

**Dr Mordrid** · 25 March 2002, 20:51

I find RAID's useful mainly because;

1. I use uncompressed video quite a bit, both uncompressed *.avi's and image sequences generated by 3D software. uncompressed & image sequences have VERY high bitrates.

2. I'm also doing previewing in MSPro using its Instant Preview, which when using multiple layers means very high additive bitrates for the whole stack...something single drives cannot handle.

Dr. Mordrid

**Hpar_** · 26 March 2002, 12:41

thanks for all the wonderful replies everyone posted. I will likely get the 2meg version, the wd1200bb, but still not sure since, I have not been able to get ahold of my buddy who sells computer parts. thanks again.

Announcement

harddrive recommends for capture...

harddrive recommends for capture...

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment