hi. I just want to know if an 8 gb slave hard disk sufficient for lets say 20 minutes of video editing...what are the pros and cons of a "slave" disk compared to a "master" disk when we talk about video editing?

-- nathan summers (zombini@libertysurf.se), February 23, 2001

Answers

this question has been answered already by people who probably know more about it then I do. Following is a paste of their answers. One part is mine.

You will want to use a codec that compresses as much as your hardware will allow. If you can compress directly to MPG1 or MPG2, great! You can expect to generate files at 10 Meg/min and 20 Meg/min epectively. If not, then you will want to compress using MJPEG or, again, using an AVI codec that compresses as much as your hardware will allow.

I've found that AVI compression can range (very ball park) from 2 Gig/15min raw (1:1 ?) to 15 Meg/15min for DivX;) (MPG4 video/ MP3 audio). With (limited) hardware, I capture video AVI raw in 10 minute segments which I use to construct VCD's with successive segments. I overlap the initial segment captures and try to make clean breaks between scenes. When the VCD plays the finished segments one after another, the segment break are noticeable, but with home video, is acceptable. With a quality video, probably not.

I capture to AVI first because this where you get the best quality and it is almost impossible to edit an MPG file. I can capture, at the highest setting on my card, a little less than 30 minutes per 2 gigabytes.

I agreed that it is best to capture raw AVI file first then convert them later. This gives best quality VCD. Hardware encoder encodes very fast but the result are not as good (and cannot be improved) unless you spend lot of money for the professional stuff. What you need is a very big hard drive (fairly cheap these days): at DV quality (720x480 resolution), it takes 13GB / hour of DV video. A 30GB drive will give you at least 2 hours of DV video capture.

I capture to an avi file in uncompressed RGB, PAL format, CD quality audio. 73 min of video play that will fit on a VCD make 31GB of avi files. When I encode this to MPEG1 I use another 680MB of space.

-- Mike (no.one@xtra.co.nz), February 24, 2001.

First of all a capture drive shouldn't be treated cavalierly; it should be assigned a high priority in your PC set-up. It should ALWAYS be a MASTER drive, NEVER slave. You can put this as your secondary master drive. Why it's like this I forgot. While we're at it, you're best off, to begin with, ascertaining just what the specs of your HDD are. NOT just any HDD will do. Your 8GB may be too slow for all you know. But forget the size for a moment. Is its seek speed less than 10ms?? Is the rotation AT LEAST 7200rpm?? Does it use either UltraDMA33/66 or UltraATA100?? Does your motherboard in fact support these connections?? Have you tweaked your OS to reflect your intentions of making this your capture drive (like disabling read- ahead for this drive, etc)?? These simple steps will determine whether you will be able to capture full-frame, at exactly your desired framerate, with absolutely no dropped frames, OR NOT.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), February 24, 2001.

Thanks for the info...how exactly does a secondary master hd work and how do i know these specs you mentioned about a hd? i“mkinda new at this...

-- nathan summers (zombini@libertysurf.se), February 25, 2001.

Any normal PC motherboard will have at least two EDIE slots: primary and secondary. Find out which is which, then you know where the secondary is to attach the HDD intended to be for capturing will be. In the PC BIOS setup select settings that will confirm you indeed attached said HDD as secondary master. This is basic PC setup; we're not even into anything that has to do with video yet. In fact, before this, you have to know whether or not your motherboard supports UltraDMA33/66 or UltraATA100. Find this out from the original specs in the instruction manual, or you can go to control panel/system/device manager/and check out all the specs there that you can. If you confirm your motherboard doesn't support this, you either have to replace it with one known to (recent Intel 815-based chipset motherboards are inexpensive and do support UltraATA100), or get either an UltraATA100 PCI interface card or better yet (and more expensively), an UltraWideSCSI PCI card. As for the HDD, you can either go to the manufacturer's website and see just what its main claims to fame are. For example, Western Digital has various model lines for a reason: the Caviar line has 5400rpm speed (NOT suitable for capture purposes) and the Expert line has 7200rpm speed (okay for capturing, but only if motherboard EIDE connection supports at least UltraDMA33). After you have all these, you now have to tweak your OS settings to optimize it for video capture, but you're not quite there yet, are you?

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), February 26, 2001.