Digital Video System Configuration

[spingo]

I’ve been video editing with premier for a year on a machine with only an 80gig hard drive and burning to SVCD and struggling lately for space. I’m the process of adding a second hard-drive and a DVD burner. Having taken a look at the forum posts I can’t seem to find any mention of System configuration for Digital Video.

My system: Running win98se, two 80gig 7200 Hds, 512ddr, xp2000 DVD burner and I also would like to retain my CD burner for the copy option.

My question is: What would be the best way to configure the cabling of the four units, ie master/slave/ide channel to get the optimum performance.

Also I’m not sure about what would go where regarding os system, programmes and storeage and partitioning of each drive, does the premier programme have to be on the same drive as the video storage?

Any help regarding this system update would be appreciated

Spingo

[Richard_G]

Your proposed system is similar to mine. I have 80Gb drive as Master on Primary IDE channel with 120Gb drive as slave on the Primary IDE. DVD writer is Master on Secondary IDE channel with DVD-ROM drive as slave on secondary IDE channel. All are using DMA (Mode 5 for the hard drives and mode 2 for the DVD/CD drives).

I've got the 80GB drive partitioned as 30Gb C: and 50Gb D: and the 120Gb is partitioned as one big capture drive. C: is using FAT32 but D: and E: are NTFS with Win XP Pro as operating system. C: has the operating system and software loaded, D: is used as storage drive for assorted bits and pieces (mp3, documents, wav, pics, etc), with E: reserved solely for video files. This also means that I can read from E: and save to D: when encoding from avi to mpeg which is both faster and kinder to the drives. I understand that some programs don't like working if you have drives using different file systems, but I've never had a problem. I've only left C: as FAT 32 so I can boot from a Win98 floppy if I ever need to.

I don't use Premiere (I use MediaStudio Pro) but it can be on any drive but it is better that it is NOT on the drive you use for storage. Personally, I would not bother with retaining your CD writer but fit a DVD-ROM drive instead. Some people think that they will wear out their DVD writer too fast if they use it too much so prefer to not use it for writing CDs. Pioneer quote an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) for my A05 of 50,000 hours. This works out to over 5 years continuous use! Going on that, long before it is worn out, I'll have replaced it for whatever is the latest.

[spingo]

Richard,

many thanks for your information, you have cleared up any doubts and misgivings I had in upgrading, and I will try your suggested set-up on my rejuvenated base unit.

John