I am editing 1080i and 720p footage on a Firewire800 drive without problems. Seems like an exception, too! ;)

For those who are saying FW is too slow, I did want to note that i had an issue with FW when capturing on a laptop via a PCMCIA adapter card. I had the camera plugged into the FW400 port and a FW800 drive in the 800 port next to it. Many dropouts. This was an issue with the PCMCIA slot bus and card and not the interface. I have never had issue with my desktop system in capturing to FW800 externals or editing with them. Perhaps they too were using cards that the input from the camera and output to drive resulted in conflict? Maybe they can elaborate on the experience.

True HD??? I wish that term was banned. People generally don't know what it means and it is too often mis-used. If he means Uncompressed HD then he is correct, but who the hell edits Uncompressed HD?

Judging that you are shooting with a HF200, i will assume you are not editing HD for pro use. So if that is the case then Firewire drives are completely fine for editing HD (HDV or AVCHD). I have even used Lacie firewire 800 drives for professional use in the field editing on a laptop in ProRes and have had no issues.

Just some clarification for some.

For capturing FW drives are OK, even USB can be sufficient, for instance with OnLocation.

For editing things change drastically. As the number of tracks increase, effects and transitions added and audio tracks added, your disk requirements in terms of sustained transfer rates increase significantly.

Given that eSATA drives are about twice as fast as FW800 and about three times as fast as FW400 for approximately the same price, the choice is obvious...

A few points.

True HD. Back when I was using 3CCD SD cameras and HD was just a wet dream in the filmmakers mind, we would call anything with 1280 X 720 or higher True HD,... because of the resolution... these compression codecs didn't even exist back then so no need to geek out on it.

PCMCIA card adapter - I have a dell Inpsiron 1520, it's just over a year old and has FW400 (I think). Where can I get a good adapter, or should I just upgrade my laptop to one that has a eSata connector?

FW800 - how do I check to see which FW connector I have and that of the external drives I have?

My Canon HF200 doesn't even have a FW port, it has USB, so no problem with file transfer there.

FW400 had either a 4-pin mini or a 6-pin connector. FW800 has a 8-pin (or was it 10-pin?) connector.

Correct, ASSUMING that you have enough COMPUTING horsepower to process multiple streams at once. The second you run out of CPU/GPU processing power and have to render, you're back to one stream. And it also depends on how many stream NEED to play concurrently: if I layer 99 video tracks (discounting audio for this example) on my FCP timeline at 100% size/speed/opacity, I can STILL play my timeline in real time without rendering BECAUSE only the top layer is visible, therefore only one stream NEEDS to play back. Now, start playing with blend modes, opacity, backgrounds, foregrounds and things change again...

Don,

Are you saying I could connect my G|TECH RAID3 to an empty SATA (not eSATA) connection on my mother board w/ some type of an connector adapter?

This link seems to indicate that's the case:

http://www.nextag.com/esata-to-sata-cable/compare-html

Thanks much!

Yes. My Gigabyte motherboards came with the adapter to provide two eSata connections. Just like this ANTOnline.com - StarTech.com ESATAPLATE2 StarTech.com ESATAPLATE2 - Serial ATA internal to external panel - Serial ATA 150/300 - 7 pin Serial ATA - 7 pin external Serial ATA - 1 ft

Ron Evans

If I do this, I imagine I have to be sure to turn on the external drive before booting the computer, so the BIOS can recognize it. And turn off the drive after powering down the computer. Do you think that's correct?

Thanks much.

On my Gigabyte board is seems that if I power up before boot it assumes it is internal drive and sometimes will not let me shut down the drive to change it, but if I power up after boot it assumes it is external and will let me power down etc as if it was an external drive. I use some Thermaltake Docks so want to exchange drives as needed so always now power up after boot.

Ron Evans

Thanks Ron. I'll get a cable and try both ways. Thanks again ;).

My experience with eSATA drives is that they work best if you power them on while the PC is booting, then power off after the PC is shut down.

Once as an experiment I just left them on and when the PC booted up, it didn't see them at all.

I use Lacie adapters and have had good success. For FW 800 I use this adapter LaCie - PC Card FireWire 800 I am not aware of an eSATA PCMCIA card but I could be wrong.

I am attaching an img of the back of the Lacie D2 quadra that uses 4 of the varies connections for illustration. Hope it helps.

Thanks so much guys. This info. should really help me out, since I could use SATA instead of firewire 400.

I wound up purchasing this cable:

Newegg.com - SIIG 3.28 ft. eSATA to SATA I Cable Model CB-SA0311-S1 - Cables

It's expensive for a wire, $23 w/ tax and shipping, but is designed for exactly what I'm trying to do.

Should arrive in a few days, hope it works well.

Thanks again.