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How to compile a huge project

sfoster

sfoster

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My laptop is SSD with out 500GB
How would I possibly compile a feature film?

There's not enough space on here to have a whole project.
Is there some type of massive external hard drive with crazy bandwidth that I would need for live video editing ?

Edit: using a macbook pro
 
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If you have the money to make a feature you need to be budgeting to hire an editor (or make friends with one) or upgrade your edit station. Editing with external harddrives is just no fun at all, and your macbook probably won't be able to handle feature length project (even if you did have the harddrive space).
 
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You don't need tons of money to make a feature film.. and I can't afford to hire an editor.
I don't know how much a professional editing system is but i'm pretty sure I can't afford one of those either.
 
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sfoster said:
You don't need tons of money to make a feature film.. and I can't afford to hire an editor.
I don't know how much a professional editing system is but i'm pretty sure I can't afford one of those either.
Click to expand...
In the most literal sense, no you don't. How much would you budget for your hypothetical feature film? There is a reason *good* films have a budget (even those super low-budget success story films like Primer had a budget of about $10,000 - and they're by far and away the exception)
You don't need a professional editing system, either. My computer cost me about $1600USD (and thats including the premium you pay for buying parts from New Zealand and/or importing them from overseas) and would be able to handle an effects light feature edit. It's nothing like a professional system, but with smart buying, you can stretch your dollar - I imagine a mac costs around the same?

It's not at all advisable, but I suppose you could get a few 3TB HDDs and plug them into your macbook, and edit off them. It would be near impossible. With my experiences using external HDDs, you'll playback for a few seconds and it'll start lagging and skipping. Maybe you can get something faster, particularly with mac. But it will still be several hundred dollars. And still riddled with problems. Can you do it? Sure. But I think it'll damage your film (particularly if you can't play it back without lag - how do you get a feel for the edit?).
 
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sfoster said:
My laptop is SSD with out 500GB
How would I possibly compile a feature film?

There's not enough space on here to have a whole project.
Is there some type of massive external hard drive with crazy bandwidth that I would need for live video editing ?

Edit: using a macbook pro
Click to expand...

Another HDD for footage is par for the course.
The question is - does this macbook have USB3?
*If the answer to this is yes, then the options are quite robust..
 
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Sage Pictures said:
Another HDD for footage is par for the course.
The question is - does this macbook have USB3?
*If the answer to this is yes, then the options are quite robust..
Click to expand...

Yes, I have two USB 3 ports .. each transfer 5GB per second
Also two thunderbolt ports which are twice the bandwidth at 10GB/ second
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
With my experiences using external HDDs, you'll playback for a few seconds and it'll start lagging and skipping. Maybe you can get something faster, particularly with mac. But it will still be several hundred dollars. And still riddled with problems. Can you do it? Sure. But I think it'll damage your film (particularly if you can't play it back without lag - how do you get a feel for the edit?).
Click to expand...

Several hundred dollars is absolutely nothing compared to the cost of hiring an editing or renting/purchasing a professional editing suite

I believe your lagging and skipping problems are caused by poor bandwidth, something I hope I can avoid
 
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Yes; they both surpass the speed of conventional HDDs. You are in luck. Just buy a well reviewed HDD - not the max TB offered, and you'll do well. Hitachi has recently pulled ahead in reliability tests over WD and Seagate. If the HDD is mini size and pulls power from the USB (no power connector), it will be speed capped relative to an externally powered full size drives. What camera?
 
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Whilst external editing is an option, I stand by what I (and countless others say if you research the topic online) said, in that it is the least ideal of options. What are your other specs on your macbook? What is your camera? A laptop is going to be underpowered in areas other than storage space that may hinder you.

Again, what would you be budgeting? I don't think it's safe to just get a few external hdds, and not budget for anything else in post. Are you budgeting for back up drives/cloud space? What if you spend your full $x budget, then get 15 minutes into editing your feature, and even with your external hdds, your other components are simply not up to the task and its largely uneditable? Your computer is only as powerful as your weakest component (relative to the task). Are you doing any effects? etc.
 
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Sage Pictures said:
Yes; they both surpass the speed of conventional HDDs. You are in luck. Just buy a well reviewed HDD - not the max TB offered, and you'll do well. Hitachi has recently pulled ahead in reliability tests over WD and Seagate. If the HDD is mini size and pulls power from the USB (no power connector), it will be speed capped relative to an externally powered full size drives. What camera?
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll look into getting one of those with a separate power supply
Panasonic AG-AC 160

cheeseandachallenge said:
Whilst external editing is an option, I stand by what I (and countless others say if you research the topic online) said, in that it is the least ideal of options. What are your other specs on your macbook? What is your camera? A laptop is going to be underpowered in areas other than storage space that may hinder you.

Again, what would you be budgeting? I don't think it's safe to just get a few external hdds, and not budget for anything else in post. Are you budgeting for back up drives/cloud space? What if you spend your full $x budget, then get 15 minutes into editing your feature, and even with your external hdds, your other components are simply not up to the task and its largely uneditable? Your computer is only as powerful as your weakest component (relative to the task). Are you doing any effects? etc.
Click to expand...

Regardless of what anyone else says about the topic, this is my equipment and situation in the real world. I've simply got to make due with what I have, no amount of convincing on your part is going to put money in my pocket that isn't there.

The specs on my macbook:
http://support.apple.com/kb/sp653

I'm hoping it doesn't let me down again like it did when I tried to run davinci resolve.

Currently there is no budget or script, I'm still working on shorts. But i recently had to delete all the files from one of my shorts to make room for the next one, so that got me thinking about the future and what sort of situation I should prepare myself for
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
Whilst external editing is an option, I stand by what I (and countless others say if you research the topic online) said, in that it is the least ideal of options.
Click to expand...

It is the case that, until very recently, USB2 was the defacto standard for external HDDs (why one sees such a wealth of discussion on the topic). This made for a bad editing time. Now, we've USB3, which is no different from internal SATA, granted the HDD in at hand is no slouch. In the industry, external editing (from RAIDs) is the standard. For example, I use a Promise Pegasus everyday. Raid is much faster than the typical HDD, but as long as you've typical HD files, the continuous read speed of a single magnetic far exceeds that of the typical mp4
 
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sfoster said:
Panasonic AG-AC 160
Click to expand...

The max bitrate I see is 28 Mbps; the Hitachi Deskstar (typical internal hdd) comes in at a continuous 108 MBps, so you'll have a great excess of speed there for single (or multiple) stream. You'll want to save your project and its cache on the local HDD. The footage will reference external
 
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Mmm... I can say, while I've not run Resolve on a Mac, I've had a lot of trouble getting Macs to play well with Premiere as soon as I enable graphics acceleration - and this is both with ATI and Nvidia. They've trouble with their proprietary EFI introducing the graphics driver/API. Try seeing if you can disable Resolve from using graphics card (CUDA/OpenCL) acceleration. I wonder if that would solve it..
 
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haha yes, unfortunately I've done some searching on the resolve forums and everyone is pretty confident that macbook pros are incompatible with the software
 
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Sage Pictures said:
It is the case that, until very recently, USB2 was the defacto standard for external HDDs (why one sees such a wealth of discussion on the topic). This made for a bad editing time. Now, we've USB3, which is no different from internal SATA, granted the HDD in at hand is no slouch. In the industry, external editing (from RAIDs) is the standard. For example, I use a Promise Pegasus everyday. Raid is much faster than the typical HDD, but as long as you've typical HD files, the continuous read speed of a single magnetic far exceeds that of the typical mp4
Click to expand...
I stand corrected. That still doesn't really mean editing on a laptop is a great option (particularly if he struggles running resolve).

sfoster said:
Regardless of what anyone else says about the topic, this is my equipment and situation in the real world. I've simply got to make due with what I have, no amount of convincing on your part is going to put money in my pocket that isn't there.

The specs on my macbook:
http://support.apple.com/kb/sp653

I'm hoping it doesn't let me down again like it did when I tried to run davinci resolve.

Currently there is no budget or script, I'm still working on shorts. But i recently had to delete all the files from one of my shorts to make room for the next one, so that got me thinking about the future and what sort of situation I should prepare myself for
Click to expand...
Right, I understand your predicament - I am in a similar situation with myself. I understand how annoying it is when people try to convince you to buy the best or not bother - I'm not advising that.

It's good to get a gauge of your options now, but by the time you come to shooting (and then editing a feature) your situation will have probably changed. You might be using a better (and more demanding on your editing workflow) camera, you may have made friends with someone who likes your films and wants to invest in you as a filmmaker, etc. So if I were you, I wouldn't buy something now to serve you some time in the future to make a feature length film, as by then, your requirements will have likely changed (and tech will be outdated). Do get a few externals for back up, however (or maybe look into cloud storage - I've never done so myself, but it seems to be becoming a more standard option) it sucks to have to delete your work.
 
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