• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

How to compile a huge project

sfoster

sfoster

Staff Member
Moderator
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
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Resolve is a lost cause for me. It was pretty frustrating because I had already bought a book on using and this laptop specifically for editing.. but such is life.

It seems to be a good computer in all other regards.

Cheese I agree it would be foolish to buy something now for editing in the future, I'm really just trying to get a grasp on my situation. Also if it's not too expensive.. it would be nice to have that hdd so I don't have to delete my old projects

Originally I looked into building a PC, but it came out to about the same cost/specs as the macbook pro.
But the macbook is portable, so I went with that. Definitely comes in handy.

Only downside is i can't really upgrade it or get a new gpu,etc
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
If you batch process your footage into reasonable proxies, you could probably bring most of those files onto your HDD. Especially if you have some good notes from your script supervisor flagging your best takes.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
sfoster said:
you lost me
Click to expand...
Convert your files to a lower quality and much smaller in data size format, with the same file name. Put the raw files somewhere else. When you've finished the edit, completely, you take the raw files and replace them with the low quality ones. Because they have the same name, your editor will recognise them and treat them as the same as the low quality ones (but they'll obviously be much higher quality).

Difficulty here is it's hard to do any effects work, even stuff as simple as sharpening or denoising an image can't really be done, because it's hard to tell what looks bad as a result of being compressed, and what looks bad due to it actually being shot that way.

There are lots of articles that explain it way better than I do if you google "proxy editing." It doesn't really solve your space issues (provided your external HDDs are fast enough to keep up with the requirements of editing), but if your other components are not up to scratch, it can lighten the load there.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'm not entirely sure this is a good suggestion, but with you having a macbook pro I do believe this will be the best option without having to lower your quality.

Now I don't own one myself (yet) but this is recommended by my classmates at FSU. You'll need a good wifi for it (as I don't know if it has Thunderport) but you can try an AirPort Time Capsule

Normally they're used as back-ups for Macs but the Capsule is 2TB that can also be used as an external hard drive and you could always get the 3TB one also.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/ME177LL/A/airport-time-capsule-2tb?fnode=4d

Little costly, but hey, you bought an Apple product.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SkyCopeland said:
I'm not entirely sure this is a good suggestion, but with you having a macbook pro I do believe this will be the best option without having to lower your quality.

Now I don't own one myself (yet) but this is recommended by my classmates at FSU. You'll need a good wifi for it (as I don't know if it has Thunderport) but you can try an AirPort Time Capsule

Normally they're used as back-ups for Macs but the Capsule is 2TB that can also be used as an external hard drive and you could always get the 3TB one also.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/ME177LL/A/airport-time-capsule-2tb?fnode=4d

Little costly, but hey, you bought an Apple product.
Click to expand...

But thats only USB 2.0 Wouldn't it be terrible for live video editing?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SkyCopeland said:
So live editing or not could depend on how fast of internet you have.
Click to expand...

How fast of an internet connection you have is completely irrelevant when you're talking about something on your home network….

Also I'm fairly confident that it would be even slower than usb 2.0 if I did a wireless transfer ..
Methinks you have given some bad advice
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'd expect he if using the wrong terminology and means wifi. Off the top of my head, the fastest domestic wifi speed is 500mbps, which is a fraction faster than usb2 depending on signal strength.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I don't know if it helps you but I use my NLE (Premier Pro) on a laptop with three 3TB external drives (all USB3) plugged in. One for cache, one for source material, one for exports/previews.

This setup runs well and I have never had any issues.

If I used a single drive, my machine would not be able to perform at all.

If you can afford to max out your computer memory then do so: MacBook Pro std 8GB but configurable to 16GB.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
HIFF said:
I don't know if it helps you but I use my NLE (Premier Pro) on a laptop with three 3TB external drives (all USB3) plugged in. One for cache, one for source material, one for exports/previews.

This setup runs well and I have never had any issues.

If I used a single drive, my machine would not be able to perform at all.

If you can afford to max out your computer memory then do so: MacBook Pro std 8GB but configurable to 16GB.
Click to expand...

Thats great to hear that it's working well for you.
What brand of external drive are you using?

FWIW I did max out my ram when i bought the computer, so i've got 16gb
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
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...

I'm interested more in this speed cap, does anyone know more about it ?
For example looking at this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Thund...7IC1I/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1417983632&

Not too expensive, thunderbolt connection should be faster than usb 3.
But it doesn't use an external power supply, so is it not as fast as advertised?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Ok, time to put this to bed.

You're looking at a mechanical drive. While Thunderbolt is faster than USB 3.0, it's an indication of the interface speed, not the speed of the hard drive, especially considering the drive (I believe) that you're looking at is a mechanical drive.

USB3 tops out at about 600MB/s, thunderbolt at about double that. Most mechanical drives top out at about 100/120MB/s. Where you'll start to see the full benefit of USB3/Thunderbolt is when you have multiple drives (either using as a raid or multiple devices being used at the same time) or when you're using SSD drives (these days you can expect 500MB/s range for an SSD drive with write speed often being less) as externals (or multiple SSD drives if you're using Thunderbolt).

The advertising saying Thunderbolt hard drive is 20X faster than USB2 is like a car advertising that the Tyres can do 500mph, where the rest of it hasn't a hope in hell of doing that (yeah, I know very little about cars, but you get the point I hope). It's a play on words. Don't expect that kind of performance from single mechanical drives.

Questions?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It sounds like there would be no noticeable difference to me using thunderbolt or usb 3 ..

Is there anything I need to worry about with buying an external hard drive in terms of future proofing? Like when things go to 4k or if I want to work with raw footage

I want to read/write to this hard drive with my projects in real time.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It sounds like there would be no noticeable difference to me using thunderbolt or usb 3 ..
Click to expand...

In most circumstances, this would be correct.

Is there anything I need to worry about with buying an external hard drive in terms of future proofing? Like when things go to 4k or if I want to work with raw footage
Click to expand...

What's the bitrate of the footage and other assets you want to future proof against and how many concurrent streams? It's a piece of string question. Future proofing will depend on what is in that future. Not all 4k footage is created equal. Take for instance, R3D footage is highly compressed and requires a rather expensive GPU to playback in full quality in real time. Raw footage, ProRes/Avid DNxHD is more bandwidth based. On top of all that, depending on what software you use, there are options and tricks to be able to play certain media types in real time. h.264 codec is not bandwidth heavy, because it's a GOP codec so it places a lot more strain on your GPU/CPU than other codecs designed for that purpose.

The next part of the puzzle is your workflow. Your workflow can also have a determining factor your hardware requirements.

I'm going to suggest that you not worry too much about future proofing in regards to external media. If it doesn't handle your future needs, use it as your backup media.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
Umm, ok. This is kind of turning into a h44 thread though.

Do your research. Here's an article, while it's a little beyond my caring to understand how it arrived at its conclusions, it claims that high RPM drives aren't good to get. Who knows if it still holds true or whether it still is true. High RPM drives are just outside my area of knowledge.

If I were you, I'd look at HDD bench marks instead of plowing blindly and falling for which may be another marketing trick.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I haven't attempted to use USB3 for editing yet, so I can't really address it's suitability for the task.

I have been editing on a macbook with external drives since 2009 with no problems though - it's really not that big a deal. I still use firewire 800, as that's what I have invested in for the drives. I've worked on a 2+ hour documentary edit from 100+ hours of source footage on this setup.

You don't need super fast drives - personally I'd stay away from the small portable bus powered drives though. Any 3.5" single or multi-drive enclosure should work, thunderbolt, fw800 or (theoretically) USB3 should be fast enough for most use.

You have to start with knowing what format you're planning to edit with - that will define your bandwidth needs. Once you know that you just need a drive that can sustain that speed behind a bus that has enough bandwidth to max out the drive.

So - what format are you shooting, and what format do you intend to use for editing?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top