I'm working on a project in Vegas 7e with 26 hours of HDV footage at 1080/24f from a XH-A1. Will be working with DV proxies..but the project will have many many layers and graphics and effects and will need to be rendered from the original HDV files to a final HDV file. Can all this be done with a USB external drive...or should I just stop my bellyaching and buy a firewire 400 drive?

thanks
jeremiah

I don't think so & Yes, in that order.


CS

Technically, USB 2.0 is a little bit faster than firewire 400. BUT- If you're going to use a USB drive, you can't have any other USB devices connected to that hub because it shares the total bandwidth with anything else connected to that particular hub. Firewire 400, while a little slower, gives you a dedicated connection and more reliability.

Of course, if you can jump to firewire 800, that would be better. Even better still would be to get an eSATA drive. You'll have to plug in a PCI card to use with the eSATA, but that will give you truly blazing throughput.

While a USB 2.0 drive might squeak by for you, you'll definitely feel the bottleneck once you start with tons of layers and graphics and whatnot. Just my 2 cents.

Giving the question some more thought, that is exactly what I was going to suggest as well. In fact, if Jeremiah goes the eSata route (depending on budget, of course) it might be worth looking at a couple of drives in a Raid 0 configuration - that sure is one heck of a lot of disc accesses you're going to be throwing at the problem.

CS