Storage (For the Edit)
This applies to video editing in general, not just DSLR-originated footage, but because of my past experiences with data loss, I hope I can help others avoid the same fate. Some of this will be obvious advice for those of you with video editing experience, so feel free to skip to the next section if you’re a seasoned editor…
First off, never edit video on the same hard drive that you’re running your operating system on. While you can save your program files on your internal drive, for the video files themselves you’re going to want a separate drive (usually an external drive).
Some tips when buying an external drive:
- If possible, buy a drive enclosure that has a fan. Heat is a killer.
- Buy the fastest interface your computer has (obviously). USB 2 is a minimum; if you have a Firewire port, get a Firewire drive; even if it’s FW400, it will be faster than USB 2. eSATA is a good deal faster than both but FW800 is also quick. If you notice those different links return a lot of the same results, it’s because many drives have multiple interfaces; this is a good thing for portability between machines.
- Don’t buy LaCie. I’m sure they make some decent products, but I’ve known too many people who’ve had LaCie drives fail on them (myself included) to be able to recommend their drives. Maybe this is because their drives are very popular and therefore there are more of them out there, but still. I don’t trust ‘em.
- If you’re going with a multi-drive RAID enclosure, don’t use RAID 0 unless you’re going to be doing daily backups — “RAID 0″ should actually be “AID 0,” because there is nothing Redundant about it. If you can afford it, get a good 4-drive enclosure and set it to RAID 5.
- Look for drives that run at 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM. They’re, um, faster.
If you’re shooting in 1080p you’re going to need a lot of space; 1TB is a good place to start these days. You can also build your own enclosure if you have a spare hard drive sitting around; I’ve built four cheap ones using this ugly Rosewill enclosure, because it has a big-ass fan and is USB2 and eSATA. Suffice to say this ugly drive has never failed on me, which is not to say that “this is a a great drive enclosure,” but I take it as evidence that a cooling fan should be a necessary feature for external drives — in the same time period I’ve been using this Rosewill, I’ve had three fanless LaCie drives brick themselves in my possession.
3 COMMENTS
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Although Redundancy from RAID 5 saves your ass from single drive failures, It doesn’t protect you against Data Corruption. I had a data corruption on my RAID 5 LaCie set, and couldn’t recover data using softwares. I called a data rescue company, and they said that they can’t even promise a successful data recovery because having RAID 5 actually complicates the process.
My way of dealing with storage from then:
Shoot Video – Copy to Editing drive – Second Copy to BACKUP Drive – Edit Files in Premiere/FCP/After Effects etc. – use any online BACKUP/Storage service to BACKUP only your project files in real time. (Or just backup every hour)This way you only have to backup a couple of MBs of files constantly.
See, you have to be at least as smart as your NLEs. They only “reference” videos. So should you.
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“This is not good advice to put it mildly.” Really? I’m telling people not to use RAID 0 unless they do daily backups. You go on to say “you need to do daily backups of your RAID 0.” I think we’re agreeing…
As for whether RAID5 works for video editing, don’t take my word for it:
>If you’re going with a multi-drive RAID enclosure, don’t use RAID 0 unless you’re going to be doing daily >backups — “RAID 0″ should actually be “AID 0,” because there is nothing Redundant about it. If you can >afford it, get a good 4-drive enclosure and set it to RAID 5.
This is not a good advice to put it mildly. The reason why people use RAID 0 (striped disks) is the speed and not redundancy: speed – that’s what you may want with NLE. Of course, you need to do backups of your RAID0. For video editing ideal setup is RAID 0+1 – stay away from RAID5. BTW, it’s another mistake to believe that “redundancy” – any “true” redundant array – can replace backup. Even with RAID5 you need backups if you really care about your data.