The transfer rate of DV is safely within the bandwidth of many standard
hard drives.
If you are working in Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express
(and many other programs
on Macintosh and PC platforms) with miniDV or DVCAM source tapes, you
can use
inexpensive IDA drives to capture and stream your video.
On Macintosh tower case computers, there is room for up to three additional
internal
hard drives. The first one can run off the ATA card to which the system
drive is attached.
The other two require a second ATA controller card, such as the one made
by Sonnet. This
is great if you have an editing room of your own.
If you edit on a Powerbook, or share computers with others and move your
operation from place
to place or station to station, you can store your streaming media and
project files on a portable
drive in a Firewire enclosure.
The Firewire enclosure must have the Oxford 911 chipset.
The drives need to run at 7200 rpm. I have had great results using IBM
Deskstar bare drives,
both as internal drives, and in Firewire enclosures. I also use Seagate
Barracuda bare drives. This is not the time or place to save $10.
You can save $40 by buying the bare drive and then putting it yourself
into a Firewire enclosure.
And if you do that, you know exactly what drive you are using. Even a
man who can't change a tire can put a bare drive in a Firewire case, and
no woman should have a problem with it.
I purchase my drives either at Fries, which is an enormous warehouse of geek stuff, or on the Internet. Here are two sources.
The last time I bought, it was about $90 for a 120 gig drive and $75 for the Firewire enclosure.
Firewire is also known as 1394, and Sony also calls it I-Link. This is just to mess with your head. It is all the same.
On the latest super-pricey Macs, the Firewire ports are
"Firewire 2" or "Firewire 800". These are faster,
and much hipper, but not worth selling your children, and children's'
children into bondage to acquire. To use them, you need a drive enclosure
that is also Firewire2. And basic Firewire will always be fast enough
for DV streaming and editing.
The only time you need something faster, is when you start working with HDTV, Digital Beta, SDI and a host of other high end formats which stream at a much faster rate than DV. Then you will need RAIDS and ultra-wide SCII and other expensive esoterica. [On the other hand, you can do your weeks and months of actual editing in DV codecs with Firewire drives, and then go to a high end facility for a day or two to conform your finished edit in the expensive format. Digital Film Tree is great for this, but contact them before you start a production in a high end format.
