capture to external hard drive

[G)-(OST]

My question is, is it possible to capture uncompressed avi pal 720x576 to an external hard drive, and if so via which connection usb or firewire? I was told when you do this you end up with dropped frames caused by the connection speed through usb or firewire

[Cole]

I have used an external hard drive to capture using USB 2, but this was using a Canopus ADVC-50 analogue to digital converter, which does the conversion work for the PC.

[G)-(OST]

I to, want 2 do a similar thing, but with a advc-1394. Do you think it will work with this capture device, or has some1 tried this

[redwudz]

There shouldn't be any problem transferring DV to an external hard drive. Firewire is better for continuous transfers. USB 2 can get interrupted by the OS and drop frames, though it will generally work.

The first post said 'uncompressed 720 X 576 AVI' to an external drive. If you were trying that, good luck. I foresee problems there. But DV is compressed, about 5:1, and the data rate is low enough for most external drives.

[SatStorm]

I can capture through firewire and a dedicated USB 2.0 port Huffyuv, PicVideo (20), DV, Mpeg2 up to 15.000kb/s and mpeg 4 (any form).

Uncompressed avi no. Maybe my system is not that fast....

[edDV]

My question is, is it possible to capture uncompressed avi pal 720x576 to an external hard drive, and if so via which connection usb or firewire? I was told when you do this you end up with dropped frames caused by the connection speed through usb or firewire

Is it possible?
yes

Can dropped frames happen?
yes, people report this happening often even with DV transfers.

[G)-(OST]

So, a second internal hard drive is the way 2 go?

[redwudz]

If you have the room in your computer, an internal drive is usually the best. If you are wanting to capture AVI using a codec like Huffy or PicVideo, you will definitely have less problems using an internal drive.

An external drive is usually OK for DV, as DV uses much less bandwidth. But you have to deal with the interfaces of the computer and the external drive box. Some people have problems there, most don't.

Even so, you will find an internal drive easier for editing and transfers between drives. It will almost always be faster than most any external setup.

[nelson133]

A second internal hard drive is best, but since I never have enough hard drive space, I have connected an external to both computers via usb 2.0. When capturing with the canopus 100 box I can capture direct to it with no dropped frames. And if you have just one capture machine , you can move captured file to another machine for processing by simply moving the external hard drive. Nyah Levi

[robertazimmerman]

I've captured using a Pinnacle DV500 card to an external USB Maxtor drive without problems. I've also used an ADVC-300 without problems. My machine is a 2.0GHz machine with 512MB RAM and two internal 80GB hard drives.

[edDV]

A second internal drive on a separate disc controller channel from the OS will be rock stable. Sharing a disk controller may still be OK. PCI bus mastering allows each disk subsystem and the IEEE-1394 port to share the PCI bus without stepping on each other.

If you use an external drive then a CPU process becomes the disk controller (firewire or USB2) and the odds of process conflict increases. That is the failure mechanism for lost frames.

This is only an issue during continuous stream capture or when feeding a continuous stream (e.g. DV from or back to the camcorder). Once the data is in is in a file, the OS will manage transfer of disk to disk file packets such that missing data is resent.

[G)-(OST]

Thanks 4 the advice peeps. 2 internal HDD's seem 2 b the smarter choice.