Hard drive-RAM questions
 

Hi everyone,
I have a dual 2.5ghz G-5 with a single 250gig HD and 2 gigs of ram. If I should go the FX1 route, is it advisable to get a second HD? Would an internal drive be better for performance than an external drive? Would boosting the ram to 4gigs have a noticeble effect on performance?
doug

Regardless of what you're editing you should really have more than one hard drive. Bad idea to capture and edit from the boot drive. Your applications need to read and write from this drive constantly, and it also gets fragmented over time since it contains thousands of small files.

Your G5 only has a slot for one additional SATA internal drive, but I would fill that for starters since it should give you the best performance and be less expensive. Installation is very simple. I have a second internal 250GB drive in my G5, plus 7 external firewire drives, and I only edit DV!

Are you planning to use FCP 5 when it comes out? I don't think anyone can give you definitive answers on how RAM will affect its performance, but I sort of doubt that you can have too much :-)

Thanks Boyd. Eventually, I'd like to get FCP5. I think that would be the easiest way to import and edit HDV footage. I'm wondering if you've ever used imovieHD or FCEHD and if so: how'd you like it. Thanks again Boyd.
doug

An external hard drive with firewire 800, might actually be faster than another internal. Also, this gives you the option of taking it with you when you go to edit at another facility. For instance if you plan on making transfers to 35mm film, some transfer houses require you to supply them with your movie on an external hard drive.

FW800 is (in practice) the same speed as an internal drive according to sites like barefeats.com

FW400 is slower, but should be fast enough for video as long as it isn't conflicting with other firewire devices on the same bus.

Thanks everyone. Boyd; I've installed a second maxtor 250gb hard drive and an additional 1gig of crucial ram. While there is no noticeble increase in performance for most effects: The rendering time for the 3-way color corrector is (slightly) faster than before the ram increase. "Motion" seems to run (ever so slightly) smoother when previewing a project in the motion timeline. Thanks again for all your help.
doug

You asked about FCEHD. I use it for 16:9 SD material & love it. Plenty of power/options for such an economically priced package. My system is truely low-rent: Mac Mini with 512MB and an external 240GB firewire drive. Your harddware should make FCEHD sing!