Good HD enclosure For vid editing

E

El Spic

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
1,249
I am looking for a good usb enclosure to do video editing on. I got a macbook so I am limited in the ports I have
It has one firewire for my DV cam and 2 usb2.0 ports.

I would like an external that is powered but the same usd port and it transfers data with. No plugging into the wall. Keeping it portable.
 
Well.. you are pretty limited there. You'll most likely need a 5v 2.5'' bus powered hard drive enclosure. USB2.0 enclosures like this are easy to find, and firewire is a little more scarce. I'd stick with firewire since with video editing you'll get better sustained transfer rates using less CPU power.

http://www.buy.com/prod/ads-pyro-13...-100-50-mbps-firewire/q/loc/101/10319929.html
^--this one I've heard good things about, but I've never used it myself.
 
I have a 160gb Maxtor portable hard drive. Tiny, USB bus powered and awesome! I bought it for portable storage... but, I've also been able to capture video with it!

I too prefer Firewire, but this USB drive is able to do video. Remember, DV only requires 3.6MB/s data rate, so any modern hard drive is fast enough. CPU utilization is higher with USB drives... but when I capture video, that's all my computer is doing at that time. I didn't edit with the drive, I only tested it for capture. It's a 5400 rpm drive... so, it might be sluggish when you're editing. But, I was mainly interested if a USB drive could handle capturing, and it did fine.

I'm on a desktop, so I don't know if a laptop with a USB drive would be any different. I'd say get a Firewire enclosure if you're picky, but, I've found that this USB drive works well.

Maxtor 160gb USB drive
 
Yea, a single stream requires 25mbit/sec, but if you are editing multiple layers of video, you have to keep that in mind. You can easily surpass the limits of bandwith in an external enclosure, especially USB where it is eating into your CPU resources more than firewire on multiple tracks of video.
 
I should just edit from my macbook HD instead of trying to edit from a USB or Firewire enclosure.

My GF has a macpro I would love to use (and I paid for most of it) and a 30" screen but she is at it all the time......:mad:
 
firewire period, unless you want to wait 10 years for USB to do it's thing.

just get an external 3.5" HD enclosure and a nice desktop HD like a raptor or something in it.
 
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