Video editing and hard disk query

[madmonk44]

I have heard that it is advisable to have a dedicated hard disk for video editing (I mainly want to burn DVD's).

Can anyone please advise me what would the dedicated disk be used for? To capture files only before editing and burning or would you put all of your capturing/editing/authoring software on this disk aswell?

Or what about having one large disk and partitioning?

What I am really asking is whether or not it is beneficial enough to make a difference your finished disk?

[Richard_G]

Use one hard disk for your operating system, software and swap file and keep the second (big) disk solely for video files. Don't put any software on the disk and don't bother partitioning. The idea is to have nothing else using the disk except for the video files so as to avoid any bottlenecks that may cause dropped frames or other problems. If you partition you are still using the same disk you are just making it work much harder.

I have a primary disk partitioned as two virtual drives and the secodary as one big drive. The first partition of the primary holds the operating system and all the software, the second partition is used for edited or transcoded video files. I capture to the secondary drive but when transcoding from avi to mpeg, I read from the secondary and write to the second partition on the primary. That way you are never trying to read and write to the same physcal disk.

[Sugar]

I agree with Richard, try to keep software and video on 2 different disks. The only caveat though is that some editing software work better when audio is saved on 1 HD and audio on another. According to the manual, this is the case for Premiere.

[FOO]

The only reason for it is speed. It cannot affect quality.

[TBoneit]

I go further:

I have the OS on C: Capture to E:
Do conversions from E: to G:

F: is a removable on a raid controller as a non-raid drive.
D: is where I keep temporary files

E: 7 G: are SATA Drives.

I find I get better speed results converting when going from one drive to another drive.

Cheers

[FOO]

Speed is also better when the 2 drives are on different IDE
cables/controllers.

[madmonk44]

Many thanks for all of your advice.

I had assumed that even with software on one drive and a second drive in place for captured files, that encoding would be still be done on the second drive.

I had not thought about encoding the captured files to the other (or virtual) drive so this has been most useful.

There is one more thing I am still not sure about and that is advice given about defragmenting. Should this be done after capture and before encoding? Or is the advice meant to be to make sure you defrag before capture so that you have a clean disk to work with?

If it is the former, defragging takes such a long time and the encoding process takes so long anyway, is it really going to make any noticeable difference to the quality?

[jimmalenko]

it will. Try it and see for youself.

[WuphonsReach]

There is one more thing I am still not sure about and that is advice given about defragmenting. Should this be done after capture and before encoding? Or is the advice meant to be to make sure you defrag before capture so that you have a clean disk to work with?

If it is the former, defragging takes such a long time and the encoding process takes so long anyway, is it really going to make any noticeable difference to the quality?

Defrag before capture to ensure that you don't have any lost frames... especially if you're capturing full-sized 720xNNN using HuffYUV or MJPEG Q20 (10-15 Mb/sec). On my 160Gb PATA 5400rpm using MJPEG Q20 (9Mb/sec), I can usually get away without defragging daily, but eventually it catches up with me and I'll suddenly drop a few hundred frames on a capture instead of zero (whoops!).

If you're not capturing video (e.g. just encoding), the only reason to defrag is for speed reasons. It won't affect encoding quality.

[madmonk44]

Thanks to WuphonsReach - this is what I was not sure about and I think I will save time now by not defragging before encoding as I have been doing.

[sacajaweeda]

There is one more thing I am still not sure about and that is advice given about defragmenting. Should this be done after capture and before encoding?

I never defrag the drive I use for video. When I'm done with a project and I've burned it to DVD, I just format the drive. Instantly empty; no fragments.

[aflowers]

Same advice, do a few videos, then reformat the drive or partition.

Lately, I've went through the capture>author>shrink>burn system for six or eight videos. While waiting for my DVD order to arrive, I was going to go ahead and capture some more videos from VHS. However, my partition is heavily fragmented. There are two steps that slow disk I/O will hurt you. That is during capture (dropped frames) and burn (bad disk writes). Whereas I will play solitaire or something during the author or shrink stages, the worst that will happen is slowing down the process. During capture or burn, do nothing that will slow down the computer. Fragmentation will slow down the I/O.

Even if you have to use a single drive, I would suggest a different partition for your videos for the same reason. Defragmentation of a partition can take a long time, and still may not result in a totally unfragmented partition - especially if it contains large files like videos. If you have a separate partition for your videos, you may not gain any speed during processing, but at least you can just reformat the partition when finished. Also, you can defrag the command partition a lot easier and quicker without all those large files.

Alf

[FOO]

Different partition on same drive as OS will not help. If the
heads have to move to the OS partition you are just as bad off as
a badly fragmented drive.

[aflowers]

You're right, it will not help the performance. But, it will help on the system maintenance. Like sacajaweeda said, get through with a project and reformat will save a lot of defrag hassles. Then, if you need to defrag the command partition, you don't have to worry about a lot of video stuff. If you want to get rid of video stuff, you don't have to worry about deleting something important. Not that us PROs would *ever* delete the wrong thing, huh![/u]

[sacajaweeda]

I've got 5 hard drives in my PC:

80GB - OS & all software
80GB - Storage *
80GB - Storage **
200GB - Capture
200GB - Capture/Working (editing, converting, etc)

* Mostly just title sets I'll be burning multiple copies of.
** Misc stuff. Sort of a holding area for caps & open projects. Often used as a temp drive when jockeying stuff around on the other drives trying to make/free up space.

Nothing stays on the big drives very long. I usually cap stuff with the PicVideo MJPEG codec set at 19 or 20, or uncompressed using the HuffyUV codec, so they're kinda like 6 hour VHS tapes that get used over and over. As soon as I'm finished with a project I wipe them. The only drive I ever have to defrag is the primary drive with my OS (on a 5GB partition) so it goes pretty quick.