Going to buy Premeire 3, however, advice on type of camcorder to buy..mini DV vs. Hard drive

I want to buy a camcorder that I can edit videos with. I am new to this and mostly for family and small business promo videos. Should I get a Mini DV camera or one with hard drive (no tapes)? I thought I would ask some people here first since salesmen seem not to know much.
Thanks and any advice on what to look for would be great.

It should be noted that it probably won't matter, on the quality issue, if it's just a little inexpensive small camcorder. Either way, the quality will probably be limited by the sensor and lens more than the format.
That being said, often times these hard disk camcorders record in MPEG format, which while being editable on Premiere, it's a lot slower with more potential for quality lost by editing the video. The tapes, on the other hand, will use DV video format, which is each frame compressed separately, making the video easy for editing software.
I prefer DV any day, because DV is a good standard and you'll be able to play those tapes on any camera or device that can play DV tapes. Additionally, DV devices nearly always (never seen one that doesn't) have a FireWire port for both device control and transferring the video directly into your editor. To top it all off, DV tapes are small and while magnetic media won't last forever, you can store your tapes away for a long time and you don't have to waste gobs and gobs of hard drive space on your PC just to keep your raw footage in case you need it at some point.
However, if it's an HDV camcorder with a hard drive, then the video would be the same to edit either way and you can record far longer than a tape allows; a 120GB drive would store about the same amount of footage as 10 DV tapes. Unfortunately, you'll lose the ability to "emulate" a DV device like you can with most HDV tape-base cameras.
Hope that helps..

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I am going to buy a new external hard drive and have some questions first

Although I asked this question several years ago, I would like to ask it again, just if in case technology in general or external hard drives in particular have changed in any significant ways.
I need to replace a 1 terabyte LaCie external hard drive that died on me after a few years.
1. I am afraid of buying another LaCie. What other brands are reliable? I heard that Western Digital is. Also another brand beginnibg with S (so helpful, I know).
2. Do I have to look for a drive that is MAC FORMATTED? I vaguely recall this term from years ago. I also remember another term that I was to look out for, but I don't remember what it was. Something like ”chronicled“ but obviously not that.
3. Should I get more than 1 terabyte? Right now I have an old, old 125 gigabyte LaCie that still lives, but it is so small that it is almost nothing
4. What do you think about buying external hard drives fron Costco as opposed to from the Apple Store?
~L

Ziatron, you wrote ”All you do is open the enclosure and the hard drive plugs in. (done.)“ What enclosure?
This is the enclosure I like, it needs a hard drive to work : http://www.cooldrives.com/ox93saiihadr.html
But there are many others.
looking at my two dead laCie ext. hard drives and they don't have ”enclosures.“ Just holes in the back to receive the cables.
A hard drive enclosure is a box or case the actual hard drive goes into. Look at the images in the link above. You can see what is inside.
This hard drive goes inside the above cool drive enclosure: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Intellipower-Desktop-WD20EADS/dp/B001RB1TI S/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1258862242&sr=8-1
You recommended getting a hard drive with a Firewire connection, but most of the hard drives have USB.
Well maybe, the better drives are Firewire.
Should that matter to me?
Yes, Firewire is "isochronous", basically meaning that you can pump "clocked" data though it in real time. USB works more like TCPIP, with the data chopped up into packets and later reassembled. (Thus, at a minimum, you have latency, that is, the wait for the data to be "put back together".) Second, the Firewire protocol allows more direct address to memory (including mass storage) with minimal intervention of the CPU.
Is USB a whole lot slower than Firewire if I am transferring materials?
Firewire is faster and _more reliable._
Take a look at the link below, "Build Your Own External Hard Drive". The enclosure I like is easier to use.
http://www.harmony-central.com/articles/tips/hard_drive/
http://macs.about.com/od/diyguidesprojects/ss/externalhdcase.htm
Also you need a Mac Pro to use eSATA, with a iMac use the Firewire port.

I want to buy a new external hard drive.

I want to buy a new external hard drive, I have an iMac now, I most likely will buy a mac pro this winter. I want to buy a hard drive that will be able to handle the highest quality video, AND work with my iMac now. Thanks
Andrew

And finally:
Make SURE you format the drive as Mac OS Extended, journalling optional but recommended.
Disk Utility Help: Erasing a disk or volume
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1009.html
In step 4, DO choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
WARNING: All your currect files will be erased.

Where Can I buy a, external portable hard drive in MANILA?

Good day.
I am from the Philippines. I am thinking of buying an external portable hard drive for my ibook. Where in Manila can I buy this? What store? and what brand do you suggest? Should i get firewire or usb?
Thanks...

You can find them at numerous online retailers - model is Western Digital WD20NPVX and the spec sheet is http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771439.pdf
Amazon has them for about $160 - again, they are too thick to fit in any Mac laptop though. And I seriously doubt you will find a 2.5" 2TB drive for $100 - that size has only recently even become available.

Advice on buying a new internal hard drive

Could anyone advise me on internal hard drives? My present one is dead and i am looking at buying a new one. I really havnt got a clue as to if im looking at pc only drives or they are all mac compatable. (The links i am using will service me in Ireland) I have a few good sites but i want to make sure that I have the right drive for my mac. I have the 13" Macbook 1st generation. Im looking at a few drives from these sites, with these particular drives:
http://www.jigsaw24.com/default.aspx?ITEM=JIGSX632ANA&AD=Y
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=343402
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=341973
http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/719219/art/samsung/hm16hji-hybrid-hard-drive.html.
I am hoping that someone could look these over and advise me if any, or all would work on my macbook. If so, i will buy one asap.
ALSO I was thinking of getting an optical drive. My now broken one, was a standard cd-rom drive which played dvds(Combo Drive). I want to now buy an optical drive that can burn dvds(As advertised on apple.com: "Superdrive"). Is there technical limitations by fitting one of these into my macbook?

Any of those hard drives will work just fine. Just pick the capacity & speed you want. And Seagate makes good drives, as does Samsung. Make sure they are 9.5mm height. (almost 99.9% of current laptop drives are.)
Replacing the optical drive requires you to open your laptop, which might be difficult depending on your comfort level. If you can open your Macbook with its millions of screws, you'll be fine. Instructions are here: http://www.ifixit.com/MacBook-Parts/MacBook-8x-SuperDrive-New/IF185-040
The optical drive must be slot loading, and must be the ultra slim type (Height must be 9.5mm.) Most optical drives are slightly thicker (12.7mm), and they won't fit.

Advice on best way to set up 500 GB external hard-drive - scratch & back-up

Hi all -
I would like to get some advice on how to best set up my new 500GB external hard drive. I do lots of video editing, so my primary use for it is as a scratch disc. However, i like to have a back-up clone for emergencies so in the past I have always had a partitioned external. One for back up, one for media. Now that Leopard has the time machine feature, i have read that some people like to use one volume on their external for TM and the other for a bootable clone (using Carbon Copy cloner). Doing this will take up a lot of space on my hard drive and I really need it for media storage. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to set this up? If I had a clone on one volume, could i then put Time Machine on my Media volume and call it a day?
Thanks so much for any feedback!
Karen

You've essentially said that you're concerned about not having enough disk space for everything you do. I suggest a 2nd drive, as there is no partitioning scheme that's going to create more space for you. I'd set up one drive with 2 partitions - a bootable partition and a partition for TM. I'd dedicate the second drive to media. I wouldn't put TM and media on the same partition; in time <grin>, Time Machine will fill the partition.
And by the way, imho you should turn TM off anytime you are capturing, rendering or exporting; you don't want it using system resources (CPU, RAM or I/O) while you're doing those tasks.

Looking to buy a regular definition hard drive camcorder to use with FCP 2

Hey all, thanks for clicking my posting. Here's the deal, I am in the market for a hard drive camcorder for use with Final Cut Pro. Will be recording sports and sports-related material (but obviously want to use it for other things as well down the road). I am using an older 1.6 Ghz tower from about 5 years ago, but am using the latest OS 10.5.7. Am looking to spend about $500, but can go up a bit if needed. Since I am using an older Mac I know that I cannot use a high def cam with it, and and this point it's not needed for what I am doing.
Was looking at the Panasonic, Sony and JVC Everio lines. I had made up my mind to grab the JVC since it has the best reviews of any of the mid priced cams out there, but was sharply warned by my Apple teacher (and 2 others there at the time) not to buy it since the .mod file format doesn't play nice with Final Cut Pro. I was going to Streamclip it into .dv but was told that I will lose quality and quite possibly audio sync. After a bit of checking around the web I found that there is an analog output of the Everio camera that I could put into my Canopus ADVC - 55 and then capture it with Final Cut Pro (the only question I have is, should I go from digital, through an analog output, only to capture it with a digital format again? Seems to me I should not go digital-analog-digital).
So let's get to the question here then, can somebody more knowledgeable than myself tell me which cameras to look at to do the job? I guess my backup cam would be the Sony SR-47, decent reviews but not as good as the Everio. Also, are there any cameras in that price range that will simply let me pull the footage right into the bin of Final Cut Pro, or do they all have to be converted from MPEG 2 into .dv (or whatever file format I want them in). I know this is a lot of questions, but I am sure there's some cameras that I might be missing, so anybody care to help me out? Thanks in advance!
Tom

As far as I know, that is the only list of compatible drives with the router. So, yes, that is the list I am referring to when I said "compatible drive list". There are very few 2TB or 3TB drives on the list. I would really like to be able to use a 3TB drive with a couple partitions, and that seems almost impossible with very few options. I have been reading around the last couple days and I hear lots of reports of people successfully using drives that are not on the tested compatible list. I just wanted to know more options from people like that.

I am buying a MBP which hard drive 100 or 120

I contacted MacMall about a price on a MBP. I received this response:
We received information that a greater speed of hard disk produces much heat.
This is the specs that I gave them:
17" 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 - 2x1GB SO-DIMMs
100GB Serial ATA drive @ 7200 rpm
MacBook Pro 17-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
17-inch TFT Display
I would rather have the faster drive even though it is smaller. Anyone know about this heating problem with the 100GB drive over the 120GB ?

A 7200rpm drive, by its very nature, will produce more heat. How much and will this negatively effect your laptop is debatable. 5400rpm, 7200rpm, 10,000rpm are just maximum burst speeds anyway. Its doubtful you will ever hit them in the entire life of the hard drive.
The speed performance from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm is, however, most noticeable. I recall my desktop flying when I first made the switch many years ago.
Considering the hard drive today is the slowest component in a system, any performance boast to it, greatly increases overall system performance. Unless you plan on copying DVD images from one folder to another for hours a day, I doubt you will ever see a rise in temperature.
Unix (which is what Mac OS X is) is very efficient when it comes to minimizing hard drive. Windows thrashes it (listen to your hard drive on boot) or during any CPU intensive task) and as such, you may see a rise in overall temperature.
However, remember that this is overall internal ambient temperature and not CPU directed. This means even if you see a rise in degrees in your hard drive, it should have no effect in raising the CPU temp. You will simply be making another part of your MBP hotter, but that's the same as increasing current temperature (be it that the CPU and hard drive are relatively close together).
In summary, I would get the 7200rpm in a heartbeat. To me, it's a no-brainer for the performance increase.

Buying a new MBP - hard drive repacement questions...

Does replacing the HD in a new MBP void the warranty? I've searched the forums but it seems there's no firm answer. Basically if I buy a new 13" I want to upgrade the HD (I Think) to the 500GB 7200 Drive (probably Seagate momentus), but I'm concerned about heat and noise issues. is there a huge performance boost between the offered 500 GB 5400 Drive? I am planing on buying the $1400 version so I get the 4GB RAM and the faster processor to start with. Is that worth the price? What about battery life - I'm concerned now that it's not replaceable that a 7200 drive would waste that battery too quickly.

Go with 500 GB, the Seagate is fine. The 7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm will give a modest performance boost, and there is really minimal additional heat, noise and power consumption with a faster spinning drive (it might mean 10 minutes shorter run time of the 5-7 hours from a full battery charge).
Be sure to order the drive without the G-force protection. The MBP has it's own internal accelerometer, and the two may conflict, so get the drive that lacks that feature.
Instructions for DIY HDD swap are on p. 37 of the manual:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/MacBook_Pro_13inchMid2009.pdf

I plugged in my external Hard drive everything was going fine, I dumped lots of music into it. Now I can find the external hard Drive Icon. I have done a search using spotlight and WD My Passport doesn't show up.

Any Idea as to where it went?

What does this have to do with iCloud on your iOS device (i.e. this forum you've posted in)?
Have you tried unplugging and plugging the hard drive back in? Tried turning it off and back on again?

Which Hard Drive to buy?

Hey Guys,
This week I'm going to buy a much needed hard drive for my iMac. I've narrowed it down to two options, and I basically need some advice on which one to get.
1] LaCie Brick
2] LaCie d2
Both are 160GB, both are the same price, both 7200rpm and both have USB 2.0. The only major differnce is that the d2 has FireWire 400 and 800 (although my iMac lacks a FW800 port).
Anybody had any experience with these drives, and recommend one?
*nathan

Hi Andy,
I have LaCie Porsche drive that's been running fine for me for a couple of years now. Good, quiet, drives, but slower than the D2. I wouldn't recommnd it for heavy duty video work and the like, but as a backup drive it is a very good choice.
Bear in mind Eric's suggestion of fitting a drive in a firewire enclosure, though, if price is an issue. You should be able to get a significantly faster, larger , drive and a good enclosure (ONLY get one with an Oxford bridge set though) for about the same price as the LaCie porsche is quoted for at the URL you provided. In Australia I found I could put together a 200 Gig Maxtor Diamond Plus ATA drive and a nice IceCube enclosure for about the same price as a 160 Gig LaCie.
Against this LaCie have a good reputation and provide good support and warranty service.
Whatever drive you go for, make sure you reformat it in HFS+ format if you want to get the best out of it.
Cheers
rod

Buying a hard drive

I'm looking into buying a new [external] hard drive and I don't know what to look for aside from the capacity. I hope you guys can answer my questions below...
- IDE or SATA? What's the difference and what should I get?
- 8MB or 16MB? Obviously 16 is probably going to be better but is the difference worth paying more for?
- USB or firewire? Yeah I plan to have it external and I wonder if there's any major difference.
- Do the brands differ?
I have my eye on a 250GB HD for under $100 or a 500GB for $250, are those good deals?
Lastly, if it makes a difference, consider that I plan to hook it up to my PC first for some video editing projects. In the very near future, I plan to hook it up to my Intel iMac. I'll probably be using the same program to edit my videos (Avid Xpress) so when I hook up the hard drive to the Mac, will it be backwards compatible? (Avid deals mainly with AIF and OMF files).
Thanks in advance!

321estrellas,
IDE and SATA are different connectors. Most iMac models have Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks.
SATA is generally faster, but since you're talking about using it externally, it should make no difference as long as you make sure your enclosure matches the connector (IDE or SATA) of the hard disk.
Why? The limiting factor for speed is the USB or Firewire bus, not the hard drive itself. Both IDE and SATA can push data faster than the bus can transfer it. USB2 claims to push data at 480 and firewire at 400, but these are "burst" rates. Tests I've seen show that firewire has a faster sustained data transfer rate.
Given that your limitation will be the interface, USB or firewire, the cache size on the drive (8 or 16 MB) should not make a significant difference.
(Most firewire enclosures have USB interfaces, as well, so you could retain the choice of interface.)
Advantages for firewire: Faster sustained data transfer rate. Can be used to boot your Mac.
This is counterbalanced by the need to use data from a Windows machine. Unless you're going to make your Windows machine capable of reading and writing to HFS+ formatted disks, you'll have to either use FAT32 on the external (which has its own attendant problems) or wipe and reformat it to HFS+ when you attach it to your Mac to reap the full benefits. (If it will be used exclusively with your Mac, you'll want to use HFS+.)
Brands differ mainly on warranty length. As a rough rule of thumb, if the manufacturer is willing to back it for a longer time, you're getting a better drive. YMMV.
Data file format (AIF, OMF) isn't important as long as you're using the same program to edit the files; hard drive format, as noted above, is. Compatibility is an issue only if you're editing on both a Windows machine and a Mac, or if you're using incompatible versions of the editing software.
-Wayne

FCPX external hard drive advice needed

I have on order the following iMac which will be used for video editing with FCPX.
3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM-2X8GB (upping to 32mb when it arrives)
3TB Fusion Drive
NVIDIAGeFrc GTX 680MX 2G GDDR5
I'm coming from an older Mac Pro with internal hard drives, so I need some advice from the video editing experts on a quality external hard drive for the new iMac. Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

You've waited a long time...
Here's the deal: Thunderbolt has a bandwidth of 10Gb/s... TB2 a bandwidth of 20Gb/s. The G Raid uses 2 disk drives with 7200 RPM platters. These drives are the bottleneck and about the fastest transfers you can expect are in the 250MB/s range... I get that (and better) with a single SSD in a USB 3 enclosure. Three or more drives would get better transfer rates; you would need a larger enclosure.
You have to ask yourself: Do I want storage or do I want speed?
To make the best use of Thunderbolt speed, you can build your own RAID with an enclosure and buy the drives (matched) separately. A Thunderbolt enclosure with SSD drives will make the best use of the bandwidth provided by TB. You can find 4-bay enclosures and SSDs up to 960GB. You can expect transfer rates of over a gigabyte/second (I'm looking an an Akitio 4-bay enclosure with an advertised speed of 1375MB/s... [ customer reviews ] -- I am not affiliated with this product in any way... I think you'll get even more info here. )
Hope you find the info useful.

Where to buy hard drive

I have an hp pavilion dv6305us notebook. I am going to have to replace the hard drive. Could someone e mail me @ [email removed for privacy] with ideas on where I can buy a new, yet affordable HDD from a repetable company.

Try www.newegg.com Be careful with size and type. Sometimes laptops will not recognize larger hard drives.
Is this your PC? http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00859833&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&dlc=en...
Look in Device Manager and click on + by the hard drive. You'll see what brand and model that you currently have installed.
HP DV9700, t9300, Nvidia 8600, 4GB, Crucial C300 128GB SSD
HP Photosmart Premium C309G, HP Photosmart 6520
HP Touchpad, HP Chromebook 11
Custom i7-4770k,Z-87, 8GB, Vertex 3 SSD, Samsung EVO SSD, Corsair HX650,GTX 760
Custom i7-4790k,Z-97, 16GB, Vertex 3 SSD, Plextor M.2 SSD, Samsung EVO SSD, Corsair HX650, GTX 660TI
Windows 7/8 UEFI/Legacy mode, MBR/GPT

Upgrade hard drive or buy external drive?

My MacBook has a 100GB hard drive, but because I've got so much music stored on there, I've only got 7.5 GB of free space.
I'm looking for advice in choosing between the following options:
-Upgrade the internal hard drive to the 200GB model. This would cost $300+ to have installed, but is a slightly slowed drive (4200 vs 5400)
-Buy an external hard drive and simply keep my music on that. But I'd have to have it with me everytime I want to access my music.
So is it worth the extra expense of getting a larger internal drive?
Thanks in advance for any comments.
Scott

Why not both?
Ideally, you should have external backup anyway, just in case of a hard drive failure. After having 2 hard drive failures in my MacBook, I'd dare say you'd be a fool not to have external backup.
Make sure to get an external drive with two FireWire 400 ports (for daisy-chaining). Seagate makes good ones, or you could buy a hard drive and an enclosure and make your own, but something tells me you're not the type.
Make a read/write disk image of your internal hard drive with the Disk Utility and save it onto the external drive.
How about you buy the hard drive, and pay me 100 bucks to install it? LOL. You could do it yourself, it's really not that hard. I just did it today, in fact.
Take out the battery, unscrew 3 little phillips screws, take out the panel, grab that white tab to the left, slide it out, move (unscrew) that little metal thing to the new drive (you need one of the fancy little hex thingies to do that) slide the new one in, screw her back up, and boom, you're good to go. Hey, but if you're not comfortable doing it, then don't.
Now, the hard part is getting all your data back on the new internal hard drive all at once. I found out today, you may need a second Mac to do that.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=888330&tstart=0
Okay, so maybe I'm a bit more daring than the average Mac user, but oh well.
Hope that helps.

Going to buy Premeire 3, however, advice on type of camcorder to buy..mini DV vs. Hard drive

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