I have an HP Pavillion zt3000 and Im wanting to turn it into a mobile editing unit...it has been suggested that I purchase a USB tv tuner and a Maxtor external hard drive 300-500MB with 16 cache memory...FWI, I will be using Vegas6 software.

I am totally ignorant to editing, so I am looking for ANY input that you guys can possibly suggest...ANYTHING!!!

Thanks
Jake

1- What are you trying to do?

i.e. are you editing footage captured from TV, or from a miniDV camera, or something else??

2- The TV tuner may not capture into a format that works well in Vegas. ?

I would get a generic drive case and put a drive in that. I bought a Maxtor One Touch but never again. It has firmware that insist upon installing a utility to facilitate backups. This application sets up deep in the system and is very hard to remove, the firmware also reinstalls any parts you do remove. The thing grabs any IEEE1394 drive you hookup and wont release it so the only way to safely remove a drive is to shut laptop down.


Grayson

I will be dumping footage from my PD170 and Z1U in SD.

i thought about going generic...what type of drive would you recommend?

Basically what i am trying to do is build a "cheap", mobile, compact studio.

Also, is it better to go with Firewire or USB 2.0? Which one will offer the least amount of degradation? Which one is faster?

Thanks
Jake

Jake:

You don't need the TV card. I assume your system has a firewire port to offload from the cameras. If you don't have one on board, you will have to buy a card that will slide in the laptop. You won't loose any quality by capturing throught the firewire, it merely transfers data ( 1's and 0's) from the tape that the camera laid down on the tape.

If you are going to capture to a separate drive, you can do so in SD with either a USB 2.0 or a firewire drive. You merely have to instruct the Vegas capture unitility to save it to the drive. They should both be able to keep up with stream.... unless there is some kind of issue with the laptop itself. I have a Maxtor USB only that works fine with my laptop for capturing.

The Maxtor doesn't have a fan on board. Better external harddrives will have fan cooling. It would be important in hotter weather. A drive could otherwise overheat, and shut down. My Maxtor has done that before.

As far as the Maxtor utility mentioned above, I never intalled it, and will avoid most any automatic type utilities on my systems. They eat up assets. ( At least on the unit I had, it wasn't necessary. )

Ditto on getting an external with a fan. I've seen my hard drive (temporarily) fail because it overheated. The drive might also last longer, since the thermal contractions/expansions would be less extreme (i.e. materials get slightly bigger/smaller depending on temperature; in glass, this is a problem if the glass cools too fast; in metal, this is a problem due to fatigue- bending the lid back and forth when you open a can will make it fall off).

2- I would try to get the Oxford chipset in the enclosure.
The Prolific chipsets need flashing, and even then they sometimes have issues.

thanks guys!

i have a have HP zx5000 w/AMD 3700 ... i bought a pcmia firewire 800 card which i sometimes connect 3 800gig drives ( 2 400gig drives per enclosure- G tech type ) ..
from experience do NOT let the external hard drives turn OFF - i find most of the time they do not turn back on and i have to reconnect them - if you didn't SAVE -data could be lost ...

i also use 3 100gig laptop drives in 1394/USB enclosures ( no fans) for on the road editing ...

in general Laptop with firewire 800 drives works very good to excellent ...
with firewire 400/USB works ok- good