Cineform and 7200 RPM WD MyBook
 

The WD 7200 RPM 500 Gigabyte USB2 MyBook is now around $129 US street price around town. I bought one and so far it seems to handle two streams of Neo HDV codec video just fine.

My question is this:

What Neo settings are safe with a USB2 7200 RPM drive? What about if I use the larger Vegas renderable settings with some of the new higher quality settings? Should I stick with medium quality with this drive? How about High or Film Scan 2 with the larger Vegas renderable format? What can I or can't I do with a USB2 7200 RPM external drive?

Ive used a usb powered drive from my M-65 to capture HDV CineForm, live via p2k many times at FS1...(15MBs average)

the only gotcha is have the space for the m2t and the avi

For external drive, USB2 or Firewire, you can be safe with Filmscan 1 -- Filmscan 2 is overkill. High is also a good choice. Medium, I don't use it..

I've been using Cineform for a couple of years now, and I remember that not too long ago, "medium" is what you guys were recommending and in fact, what the frame capture examples on your web site still are. Is "medium" quality still as good now as it was back when you were recommending it?

So far I haven't seen a difference, but then again, I have an older thirty something inch HDTV that may not show off artifacts that might be easy to see on a fifty or sixty inch set. Are there some frame captures available online which might show the difference between different levels of Cineform compression?

It is my understand that the two "filmscan" modes are there for material that originates as film and overkill for something that originates on an HDV camera. Is that the case?

Medium is in fact better than is was. But we now have pre-compressed data streams, so we have higher quality levels for the most prestine captures. Also the market has changed from early adaptor HDV users looking for a solution, to filmmakers looking for optimium workflows.

What is a "precompressed data stream"?

Examples of pre-compressed streams are HDMI from Sony V1U and Canon HV20, HDSDI from Canon XL-H1, and analog output from most HDV camera when the data is captured live. None of these outputs have undergone MPEG compression, nor have they been down-sampled to 4:2:0 (required by HDV MPEG.) We now do a lot of capture of this data, so CineForm is being more commonly used instead of uncompressed, that why the upshift in quality.