Eternal drives and imovie

[scarlets knees]

I have a pb with 80gb hd. I had about 55gb spare and started to download my dv stuff of my daughter in order to make DVDs for people for christmas. After the first 60 min tape was loaded in the space on my pb dropped to 45gb. I have 4 more tapes to go so.....I have soem questions

1. I was thinking of getting an external drive to load all the film onto anyway can anyone suggest a good one or tell me what to look for. I have about £150
2. If I load all the film on the the external can imovie/idvd and my pb deal with editing on the external or does it need ot be on the main drive?
3. If each tape is going to take up 10gb how the hell do I get as much as possible onto a dvd that only has a 4.5gb capacity, does imovie/idvd compress stuff down and if so how much film (i.e. hours/minutes) do you think I could get onto a 4.5gb disc?

Thanks for answering what are probably dumb questions but this is one of the main reasosn I bought a mac....

 

[mad jew]

Eternal drives and imovie

Spell checker can only help you so far...

1. I was thinking of getting an external drive to load all the film onto anyway can anyone suggest a good one or tell me what to look for. I have about £150

Get one with Firewire.

2. If I load all the film on the the external can imovie/idvd and my pb deal with editing on the external or does it need ot be on the main drive?

It can edit from the external AFAIK.

3. If each tape is going to take up 10gb how the hell do I get as much as possible onto a dvd that only has a 4.5gb capacity, does imovie/idvd compress stuff down and if so how much film (i.e. hours/minutes) do you think I could get onto a 4.5gb disc?

Yeah, they get converted.

 

[MacDawg]

Should have plenty of room on an eternal drive

Buy Firewire
Buy as large as you can afford

As best as I can tell from my daughter's work, the iMovie files, etc. will be quite large, but it will burn smaller through iDVD to a disk.

Woof, Woof – Dawg

 

[numediaman]

Just a suggestion . . . store all your clips and such on your external hard drive -- but if you are going to use iDVD, make sure you have the final movie on your internal hard drive. This can prevent a failed burn. Also, I always burn a disk image instead of having iDVD actually burn the disk. This way I can open the disk image with DVD Player and check it out before actually burning it to DVD. I then use Toast to burn the final disk -- though you can use Disk Utility, as well.

 

[Applespider]

I use an external drive to edit in iMovie. You just save your project to the external when you create a new one and all your media files will be stored there. I connect the Mac to the external drive with a FW800 cable and it's perfectly responsive except for the occasions where I wander off and come back 10 minutes later to find the external drive has spun down; it comes back up within seconds though.

Interesting tip on using iDVD on the internal HD though - I hadn't considered doing that (so far have only exported to web). What's the likelihood of a failed burn if you use an external drive?

 

[stevep]

Buy Firewire

I agree - if you get a big enough one you can partition it and use one partition to clone your existing drive, and the other for your movie work. You can then boot off it if you need to (I don't think you can boot off a usb drive).

 

[scarlets knees]

Thanks all, think the 'eternal drive' may be worth patenting before some smart arse at apple gets there!
Was always looking at firewire and saw a good review today in macworld (UK) of a new formac drive that seemed ot fit the bill, think I can get a 250gb for my £150, doesn't look portable though but i doubt i'll be taking it out.

 

[Makosuke]

To help you with the math a bit, the DV video streams iMovie uses natively eat up about 1GB per 5 minutes of video. This is because it's not heavily compressed, to maintain quality and ease of editing.

iDVD recompresses the video as MPEG2, the DVD format, which is drastically higher compression (as well as variable). So, using iDVD, you can fill up a 4.5GB DVD with anywhere between 1 and 2 hours of video; the quality with 2 hours will of course be a little lower than with 1, but it's not a huge difference so long as you have iLife 05 (which uses a better compression algorithm than earlier versions).

So, if you're going for maximum stuff on minimum DVDs, you're going to be able to fit two 60 minute miniDV tapes on one DVD, but you're going to need an absolute minimum of 30GB of hard drive space to work with it (25GB for the iMovie raw video + 5GB for the DVD master), and if you're adding any transitions or titling, you'll need more than that.

And I agree that it's a VERY good idea to make a disk image with iDVD first so you can test it without wasting a disc (and burn as many copies as you want at your leisure).

 

[puckhead193]

i learned an interesting tip when i was at a workshop for final cut express. If you save the project to an external drive, the rendering time and all the other stuff will be faster because of the computer only has to focus on one thing allowing all the processing power to be put towards the program instead of the computer worry about storing it etc.
Does this make sense.... she explained better then me....

 

[Applespider]

i learned an interesting tip when i was at a workshop for final cut express. If you save the project to an external drive, the rendering time and all the other stuff will be faster because of the computer only has to focus on one thing allowing all the processing power to be put towards the program instead of the computer worry about storing it etc.
Does this make sense.... she explained better then me....

This certainly seems true when working on a laptop drive which is generally slower than a desktop one. On the few occasions when I tried iMovie with the video on my hard drive, rendering did seem to take much longer than it does with bigger projects on the external one. I guess that computer is only using the internal drive as virtual memory rather than writing to it and using it as virtual memory?

 

[Will Cheyney]

If you're looking at Firewire hard drives, I highly recommend the LaCie d2 range. Buy as big as you can afford - you can never have too much hard drive space... It will all eventually get used! (especially if you're going to infrequently video edit)

 

[Makosuke]

i learned an interesting tip when i was at a workshop for final cut express. If you save the project to an external drive, the rendering time and all the other stuff will be faster because of the computer only has to focus on one thing allowing all the processing power to be put towards the program instead of the computer worry about storing it etc.
Does this make sense.... she explained better then me....

This is true, but only in specific situations.

For example, if you're on an iBook with a slow internal drive, then the external Firewire one is going to be tremendously faster. Similarly, in a situation more like the one you're describing, if you only have a single internal drive and don't have gobs of RAM, then there's going to be some drive access for the OS, the iMovie app, and virtual memory, all of which are competing with the actual project rendering and thus slowing down the project.

But if, for example, you have two internal drives (Power Mac, obviously) and you're editing on the non-boot one, it's almost certainly going to be faster than using a FW400 external (because the internal bus is faster than FW400). Likewise, if you have a very fast, very large internal drive and a lot of RAM, it's possible that there will be little access to your internal drive other than the rendering, in which case again the FW400 external will slow it down since it just can't get data on and off as fast as the internal.

In general, though, keeping your video work on a drive by itself is a good idea for both speed, convienence, and so you don't mess anything up if you accidentally overfill the drive.

 

[Vader]

I actually just did this.
I bought an internal 160 gb drive for $90 US but it has a $40 rebate, so it is only $50.
The enclosure I bought is, well, its firewire, and has and Oxford 911 chip, so it is fast. $65

I believe after that rebate, that would fit your price range, I didn't convert from US $, but i think it is close.
Links:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1477502(the drive)
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW911PLUS/(the enclosure)

Edit: forgot to mention that it has been working perfectly for me in iMovie.

 

[scarlets knees]

Thanks Vader and everyone.

Another question, what's a disk image and why is it different?

 

[Vader]

You can have multiple disk images on one hd.
You can partition out a certain amount of space to each.
ie: One big portion for video, then a smaller portion for all other files.