G4 Powerbook and video capture
 

G4 Powerbooks have an Ultra hard drive that runs at 4200 rpm. Is this fast enough to capture video from a camcorder? Desktop Macs run at 7200 rpm and Powerbooks offer a 5400 rpm option.

get an external firewire drive at 7200rpm... look at that g-raid if you have any extra scratch... medea array looks cool.

I've done it before and it worked, but only tried with short clips. I second the notion of an external drive however, that will definitely work for you. Aside from any capture issues, you don't want to put video on the same drive as your system and applications.

If you have a newer powerbook many come with FireWire 800 as well. That would be a little bump from 400. The problem with going up to an internal 5400 drive is that your PowerBook will run even hotter. Supposedly an external FW 800 drive with a 7200RPM drive inside it will give you performance close to an internal 7200RPM drive.

I guess this brings up another question. I have Firewire 400 external 7200 rpm drives but will Firewire present a bottleneck?

I use a PowerBook G4 with my 250gb FW400 drive and I haven't experienced any bottlenecks with it. I run the hard drive off of a FW400 cardbus and the cam straight off the PowerBook FW400 port. I haven't had any problems so far.

So Leonard, you could always get a PCMCIA card to add more firewire ports if things become problematic, that way you are using two separate channels. Even if a powerbook has 2 firewire ports, they use the same channel so you might run into problems, but then again, you might not. Even though the cardbus is 32 bit you still get enough data through to fill firewire 400.