Update on Capturing HQ to External USB Drive

[Mark Von Lanken]

Thanks for all the input to my earlier post. We did the Wedding Day Edit in HDV with little problems. The little problems consisted of Edius crashing twice during capture and editing, something that happens very rarely during SD editing. I understand that editing HDV on a laptop through an external USB drive is pushing the system pretty hard.

The workflow with Edius in HQ is great. The only effects we used were slow motion and anti flicker and the timeline would playback in real time.

We changed the project settings over to SD and output to tape for the projection at the reception. Their projector was not HD.

We then changed the settings back to HDV and rendered so we could make a master tape from it. We then also made some DVDs for the B&G and family.

Here's the edit.
http://tulsaweddingvideos.com/video/OSWDEHD.wmv

[STORMDAVE]

Congrats :)

You should think about an eSATA solution in the future...and maybe a RAID0 setup with two 500GB SATAII drives for example. They are about $89 each right now at circuit city, and an enclosure for about $50-$200, you'll get a setup that does about 100-120MB/sec!

You can probably do a mirrored RAID1 just in case if the need arises, and you'll feel a bit "safer".

[Rusty]

Hea Mark,
What an unbelievable event!
That was flat-out stunning!
You guys have that absolutly nailed!
Need I go on?

So, back to your original post on external drives...

It brings back my original question, unless you are burning to Blu-Ray that night, why edit HQ? Sounds like you did make DVDs that night. (They were probably pretty darn good, right?)

If a B-R disk is required in the future, I'd be tempted to recreate the edit in the studio.

We have two more SDE's comming this year, thanks for setting the bar again!
Rusty :() agape

[kwshaw1]

Mark: nice work! It sounds like you're working in the HQ format, which shouldn't give you too much trouble if you stick to 1-2 layers from the external drive. I did a quick test with HQ recently and was able to play three layers smoothly via USB2 using either PIP filters or the multicam mode. This makes sense because HQ at standard quality generates files about three times the size of HDV, which implies an average bandwidth of 25x3 = 75 Mbps. (I don't know why BH says it's higher.) Compare that to the theoretical bandwidth of USB2 at 480 Mbps and three layers of HQ would only be about half the bandwidth limit, so 1-2 layers shouldn't even strain the technology. A more likely culprit is that hard drives can only stream data as fast as they can read it from their platters, especially if they have to access data in two or more places at once (e.g. for doing a transition between clips).

In any case, if you're having trouble with Edius crashing when working in HD, I'd suggest testing other factors besides the speed of the USB2 connection. It couldn't hurt to use faster eSATA drives and/or capture some of your clips to the laptop hard drive, but that may not solve your reliability issues. Or as Rusty suggested, you could just capture in SD for the same day edit and recreate that in HD back at the studio, but as someone who believes in efficiency I can understand not wanting to do that. HD editing should work reliably under pressure.

Also, would it have worked to output directly from your laptop to the projector so you didn't have to make a tape first? I went direct from my laptop for a montage once and that worked fine, with a little care to make sure everything was in the right display mode.

[Mark Von Lanken]

[QUOTE=STORMDAVE;7990]Congrats :)

You should think about an eSATA solution in the future...and maybe a RAID0 setup with two 500GB SATAII drives for example... QUOTE]

Hi Stormdave,

That's our plan. I bought a 500 gig drive for $99 just last month. If I would have known I would have spent just a little more and gotten a SATA drive. Well you live an learn. Thanks for the input.

[Mark Von Lanken]

Hea Mark,
What an unbelievable event!
That was flat-out stunning!...

...unless you are burning to Blu-Ray that night, why edit HQ? Sounds like you did make DVDs that night. (They were probably pretty darn good, right?)

If a B-R disk is required in the future, I'd be tempted to recreate the edit in the studio.

We have two more SDE's comming this year, thanks for setting the bar again!
Rusty :() agape

Hi Rusty,

Thanks for the kind words. We were hired by another videographer to produce the WDE for his client. We wanted to be able to turn the files over to him in HDV that night for two reasons. One, because the completed wedding will be delivered in Blu-Ray, and two, because we drove 250 miles to his market, so it wasn't like he just lives next door. 250 miles was not that big of a deal considering we have traveled 1500 miles four times to produce WDEs. Yes, we love California.

I don't really like the idea of recreating an HDV edit from a DV edit. I did that very thing for a one minute trailer, and while it is certainly possible, it is a hassle. After doing this WDE in HQ, I feel that it is much easier to do an HDV WDE in HQ than in DV and then going back and recapturing and re editing in the HQ codec.

Good luck with your upcoming SDEs.

[Mark Von Lanken]

Mark: nice work! It sounds like you're working in the HQ format, which shouldn't give you too much trouble if you stick to 1-2 layers from the external drive...

...Also, would it have worked to output directly from your laptop to the projector so you didn't have to make a tape first? I went direct from my laptop for a montage once and that worked fine, with a little care to make sure everything was in the right display mode.

Hi Kevin,

Thanks.

On two occasions we have output directly to the projector from the laptop. It makes me really nervous. Since we were doing minimal filters, the buffer stayed around the 96 range when playing back the timeline in HQ, but if for some unexpected reason, the computer locks up when going directly to the projector, 200-500 people get to experience the embarrassment with you. If it locks up when going to tape, you just do it a second time and no one even knows about it.

Since the project was only about four minutes and everything played back in real time through firewire, when switching back to DV mode, I like the insurance of playing back from tape when projecting a WDE.

[kwshaw1]

Yeah, direct from the laptop can be nerve-wracking, since it introduces additional complications. For future reference, you could also render out to an MPEG2 file on a USB flash drive and play that to the projector using something like the Avel Linkplayer2 or Sony Playstation 3. This would save you the step of recording back to tape and should be as reliable as anything, since there would be no mechanical device involved in the playback. (In other words, attach your flash drive to a suitable player and play the video from the drive.)