Capture / Scratch / Render....?
 

"Capture / Scratch / Render"

Ok, from what I’ve read, this supposedly is the best setup for a video editing rig.

Say I were to build a video editing system based on this method, would I need 4 Hard Disks overall, or just 3?

1. OS Drive

2. Capture Drive

3. Scratch Drive

4. Render Drive

Also, would it work like this??:

1. Capture the video to the “capture drive”.

2. Copy the captured video from the “capture drive” to “scratch drive”.

3. Render final video from “scratch drive” to “render drive”.

I hope I’ve made sense LOL :P

Any suggestions will be appreciated. ;)

Thanks!

For most of our DV projects, we just have the OS drive and another disk. The other disk is set as the Capture Scratch disk and as the Render Disk.

This is under FCP. Basically you capture your footage to one disk. That's where the raw footage lives and in my simple opinion, it is easiest to let it continue living there. I see no reason why the render files can't live on the same disk as long as you are ok on disk space and speed.

For DV, this shouldn't be a problem. I can't imagine it would be too much of a problem for HDV/DVCPRO HD. With our JVC HD100, we've been editing in AIC and it is no problem with the above setup (OS disk/capture disk).

What I have, is my system drive for the program, and a 2 disk raid array, where I keep the project and files, the capture folder, and the scratch folder.

Thanks for the reply guys!

I just assumed you need 3 Hard Drives minimum, cause I was once told that having a setup where the Hard Drive was reading and writing to itself, that this could cripple performance...? Is this just a "myth"?

While I imagine reading/writing at the same time can reduce performance, think of it this way:
When you are playing back, you are (mostly) reading.
When you are capturing and rendering, you are (mostly) writing.

I wouldn't think there is actually all that much crossover. The exception would be the OS - which is why it's not a bad idea to have that on a separate drive.

Of course, this applies to DV and other friendly forms of video. Some of those nasty high bandwidth formats need lots of space and lots of... bandwidth. So more thought needs to go into the storage system then throwing a couple Firewire/SATA drives at the problem.