USB powered hard drive and Edius 4.x

[RonnieMartin]

In a few weeks I will have a gig that involves riding a chartered bus to various locations to shoot. I will be using my Ex-1 and wonder if the
USB powered portable drives that I see advertised would be fast enough to edit HD rough cuts on my laptop with Edius 4.61 BC. I will have a lot of down time while riding to the next location and need to dump the cards to the external drive. All of the small portable compact drives that I have seen are 5400 rpm drives and if they would be fast enough to play one line of video on the time line I could use that time to rough cut the project as I ride. Hopefully I will be able to get my power from a small AC inverter that will plug into the cigarette lighter.

Thanks
Ronnie Martin
Kato Video Productions

[Philip]

In a few weeks I will have a gig that involves riding a chartered bus to various locations to shoot. I will be using my Ex-1 and wonder if the
USB powered portable drives that I see advertised would be fast enough to edit HD rough cuts on my laptop with Edius 4.61 BC. I will have a lot of down time while riding to the next location and need to dump the cards to the external drive. All of the small portable compact drives that I have seen are 5400 rpm drives and if they would be fast enough to play one line of video on the time line I could use that time to rough cut the project as I ride. Hopefully I will be able to get my power from a small AC inverter that will plug into the cigarette lighter.

I have a small portable 2.5 external USB drive that is USB bus powered. No power cables needed. Just plug it in and it gets power from the USB port. I am only doing SD on the laptop but I have captured and edited complete Same Day Edit presentations off the USB drive. The drive inside the small enclosure is a 2.5 100gb 5400 RPM drive. I am not sure the bandwidth needed for EX1 files or if they are being upconverted to HQ. I am pretty sure that little 5400 rpm drive will handle one stream of HQ as well.

The one I have even has a 6 PIN FW port on the back. You can get the stability of FW if you prefer that. When you use the FW port you have to use a second USB cable (supplied with the enclosure) to power the drive. It is a slick little setup and not much bigger than a pack of smokes...not that I smoke.

This is the one I have...just get an OEM 2.5" drive and install it yourself...it even comes with a small screwdriver.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817146035

You could get a 7200 rpm drive and it would probably be just fine for your project. With something like this no power inverter is needed to power the drive.

[Rusty]

External drives work fine if you are exporting from the Sony Clip Browser to .mxf directly to the drive. Edius will take it from there with single stream playback, no problem-o.

[STORMDAVE]

Check this RAID out.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11038

They're sandwiched 2.5" disks set to RAID0. From reading the specs, it only requires power if you are powering via USB and eSATA, so with FireWire you don't seem to need power!

[pjsssss]

Ronnie, Sam's Club has the 320G USB powered Passport HD for $119
I don't know if it will work for what you want, but for that price it is worth trying.
Here is the WD Site link, but it is cheaper at Sam's.

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=391

[kwshaw1]

I've used bus-powered USB drives to edit three-layer HD videos, but with GOP-based footage it helps to convert to the Edius HQ format first. For single layer with basic cuts you may be okay, and if Rusty says it works I'd go by that.

[RonnieMartin]

Thanks guys for the info. I will just be doing rough cuts while traveling. When I get back to the office I will down load the project folder to my desktop for final edit and adding music and effects. I am ususlly borded silly while riding unless I am driving. Even then I can think of a 1000 things that I need to be doing.

I will take a look at the drive over at Sams.

Ronnie