Re: Working with .mov files...
Dec 11th, 2009, 10:22
Hi Sammy,
if your project has turned out to be in the region of 9GB, then I would say it's of a reasonable length to justify it's own drive.
DV files themselves only require about 3-4MB/ sec as a streaming file size/ information rate and a hard drive can provide around 30-40MB/ sec depending on drive speed etc etc. So in the big picture, the movie won't stress the hard drive by itself at all and as Rounik pointed out, DV files don't need uncompressing so it won't tax the CPU too much either to playback.
The thing is though, if you put your movie file on to the same drive as the project, which holds lots of audio files, samples, impulse responses for reverb etc, then you are asking the hard drive to find all of these files as well as continuously playback the video file and all without dropping frames. Excluding what buffering does, it's kind of like asking a CD player to playback 3 or 4 songs at the same time which in turn is asking the laser to be in 3 or 4 places at the same time so.... not a good idea.
It makes sense to use a separate drive, external or not, just to make your computer's life easier to run everything. At least that way you know you have set your project file up the best it can be with what you have.
PhotoJPEG is another format that doesn't need uncompressing and is on par with DV files for playback.
My 2c anyway.
Cheers,
John