HA! It worked! I'm now able to capture camera-to-firewire(400)-to-MBP-to-ethernet-to-Quad-to-firewire(800)-to-external.

* PLUS *

I'm able to use iMovie to capture, so I don't have to own two versions of FCS2! Now I can edit away while new clips are added to the same external. I just grab them when they're ready. This is going to increase my productivity big time. The only unknown at this point is the quality of the clips. (iMovie is an entry-level program, so it's pretty vague.)

God bless you guys!

Dana:
Can you summarize how you set this up? We have a G5 and MBP and may want to give this a go.
Thanks,
John

Really. Have you tried editing while you are capturing?

How hard can you push disk access on your Quad without causing problems for the MacBook capture? I've wondered about using this for live capture to a single drive, while my wife shows previews of other clips off the same drive, but I've been afraid of dropping frames. Do you think the drive write cache is sufficient to absorb any lag incurred while reading other files?

-Terence

Hmm, I don't know. I don't do anything on my laptop when it captures, but I would think it wouldn't matter what I did on the Quad. The External might be another issue. If you did have problems, she could always use the internal, although copying files can take forever.

I, too, am trying to select a new storage solution for my system, while I am in the process of replacing my iMac with two computers (a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro). What I would like to get out of this solution is:

- large capacity (2 TB or more)
- protection from data loss in case of drive failure
- transfer rate: fast enough to support HDV (mostly), Apple ProRes 422 (sometimes), and MultiCam editing with three or four angles
- easy sharing between my two computers

The only solution that I can think of that meets all these requirements is a RAID with Gigabit Ethernet - but I am no storage expert. So I'd welcome suggestions for alternative solutions that I should consider.

Thanks in advance for your help!

- Martin