Does it make any difference in quality
 

whether one burns a dvd consising of video footage.....set-up 1

a1)Source:coming from an external hard drive connected to a firewire port

a2)Destination:to an external dvd burner connected to a second firewire port on the same computer.

as opposed to:set-up 2

b)burning it with both an internal hard drive and and internal dvd burner?

I'm wondering about frame drop outs in the final product or just maybe the thing just locks-up & freezes midstream during the burning process because my cpu/system is only 2.6 ghz with 256 megs of ram.

Or there any pros and cons in either of the above set-ups or something to be considering before I buy both an external hard drive and an exteral dvd burner?

The reason for this request is all of the disk drive bays on my computer are presently occupied.My onboard drive is too small (it's needed for audio/music)
and the onboard dvd-drive is only a player.

Just trying to become better educated and not to end up with 2 more peices of gear which I may become unhappy with as I want to do it right the first time.

Thanks for any input,experience,suggestions or advice offered.

Bruce the Newbie (yeah,but fortunately not forever)

As a PC technician, first let me say if you're running Windows XP and doing video work, especially burning DVDs, though it works on 256MB of memory, I suggest at least 512 (I recommend 1GB or more).

I assume you're using a computer with an on-board video card... many of the "cheaper" computers (HP, e-machines, etc) will actually use part of your system's memory for video card RAM. Some of the better models with on-board video has dedicated RAM on the motherboard just for video.

Anyway, Firewire (IEEE 1394) is fast, nonetheless, but I personally use internal hard disks, and an internal DVD writer. I don't have much experience with external equipment (though I'm considering an external 1394 hard drive for some extra "scratch" space working with videos). No matter how fast the 1394 (Firewire) bus is, you're still limited to how fast your hard drive can transfer data. I know that IDE is limited to 133 MB/sec (correct me if I'm too far behind), but Serial ATA is much faster... I think they're at either 300 MB/sec or 600MB/sec, and Firewire is limited to 400 MB/sec (except the new stuff, I think it's 800MB/sec)

Anyway... bottom line: I prefer internal drive because of less clutter, but a good, fast External hard drive (Lacie comes to mind) should work just fine with an external DVD burner (someone please correct me if I'm wrong! I work for a company that uses ancient equipment, and I mostly work on servers). Also, most external drives such as that have their own power supplies, which is great for smaller computers because you don't want to have to buy a 550 watt power supply to power 5 internal hard drives like I do! If you want ultimate speed, get a SCSI drive, 15,000 RPM and 320 MB/sec transfer rate running RAID 5 (... drool)

Good luck

external drives
 

1st Nicks information is good stuff!!

I use two exernal drives and an internal and external burner. I use one drive as back up for the other, the internal drive holds all my software. tthe external burner is a dual/double drive so I can burn 8 gigabyte projects onto a single disc. for making copies of dvds I like the two bays, just makes it alot easier.

I run three fire wires from the computer, two to the drives and one to an 8 plug hub. I also have my external burner running usb 2.0 which is adequate for copying dvds, ever so slightly slower than fire wire, and I also have a six port usb hub as well.

I seldom have trouble with the external equipment. Oh yea, I use maxtor drives.
On my wish list is a computer with enternal hot exchangable hard drives, dual core and running 3 gigs or faster.

Gus

My wife calls my computer room, "mission Control

I like "mission control"

for internal hard drives, I recommend Seagate, but the Lacie external is the best 1394 (Firewire) external available IMO. For years, I've never had a Seagate fail on me (knock on wood....... please!), but I've seen Western Digital drives (these are the WORST), die after about 15 minutes of use, and Maxtor drives have burned up after a week. The only bad Seagates I've used were ones that were bad from the factory, which Seagate replaces, no questions asked. Fujitsu is also a good hard drive manufacturer, as this is mainly what we use in our servers at work.

difference in quality
 

Bruce,
I agree with Nick re your 256mb of ram.

That is way too low. I would upgrade to 1 gig. You will likely see a lot of your problems go away.
Glen

Thanks all for your responses
 

So definitely I need to upgrade the ram.

What do you reccommend for DVD burners/players both external and internal,what do you use sucessfully?

Am I better off to get a firewire,firewire + USB 2.0 or a USB 2.0/1.1 ports on the DVD drive?is more variety better and can it be cost efficient?

I don't know if my Dell Dimension has USB 2.0,1.1,1.0 or whatever as it's closing on 2 years old this spring.

I guess I could replace the internal DVD player with a combo,dual use drive.

If it takes about 12-13 gigs for an hour of DV audio/video,how do I squeeze that to a 4 or 8 gig dvd without losing quality?

I need an external drive because I will be working withanother collaborator on projects and we'll need to share the drive and trade it back and forth.\

Thanks for all of the advice.

Bruce

This is the DVD burner I use, it works great (no coasters yet, burned over 1200 discs, both CDs and DVDs)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106013

Can't beat $50 for a dual-layer DVD/CD-RW combo.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe 13GB an hour is for standard DV-compressed footage. When you burn it to a DVD (I use Encore DVD), it compressed it into MPEG2.

I recently did a project that was an hour and 3 minutes, a little over 13GB, and I burned it to a single layer DVD with some room to spare... complete with menus and everything.