Does it make any difference in quality

[Bruce Pelley]

whether one burns a dvd consising of video footage.....set-up 1

a1)Source:coming from an external hard drive connected to a firewire port

a2)Destination:to an external dvd burner connected to a second firewire port on the same computer.

as opposed to:set-up 2

b)burning it with both an internal hard drive and and internal dvd burner?

I'm wondering about frame drop outs in the final product or just maybe the thing just locks-up & freezes midstream during the burning process because my cpu/system is only 2.6 ghz with 256 megs of ram.

Or there any pros and cons in either of the above set-ups or something to be considering before I buy both an external hard drive and an exteral dvd burner?

The reason for this request is all of the disk drive bays on my computer are presently occupied.My onboard drive is too small (it's needed for audio/music)
and the onboard dvd-drive is only a player.

Just trying to become better educated and not to end up with 2 more peices of gear which I may become unhappy with as I want to do it right the first time.

Thanks for any input,experience,suggestions or advice offered.

Bruce the Newbie (yeah,but fortunately not forever)

[Andrew Khalil]

it's always better to use the internal bays, but that doesn't make it impossible to use external devices.

It would be cheaper to replace the DVD player that is currently occupying your bay with a DVD burner than buying an external one.
After that, you should be able to burn off of an external drive no problem, I do it all the time.

I don't know what type of computer you have, but it is also possible to have 2 hard drives inside the computer.

You may also want to consider doubling or even quadroupling ram - it makes a big difference, especially with Windows XP which is what I'll assume you're using.

I should have asked this at the begining, but are you using a laptop, or a desktop?
If you're on a laptop, I think you should be fine with an external firewire drive and burner, but like I said, ram will play a big part of it.

[Bruce Pelley]

Thanks for your input.

So,I'll need to buy ram,at least an additional 256 to 512 megs.

What type of an internal DVD burner/player combo do you use?

I know someone who would probably install one for me if I went that route.

Do you have any reccomendations:specific brands and models?

One limitation is that presently I have 2 internal hard drives and the Dvd player onboard which combined maxes out all of the bays available.

Therefore replacement of an existing drive is the only option internally right now.

Thanks again.....
Bruce

[Andrew Khalil]

In terms of brands, I don't think it's a big deal as long as you buy a known brand that will be able to record all the DVD formats you desire.
In terms of hard drives, just make sure you get a drive that's 7200 rpm and uses firewire and you should be good to go.
Let me know if you have any other questions.

[Mark Burlingame]

Actually the brand of the DVD burner DOES make a difference. This is most important if you want to use whatever media you find, or you want to use the cheapest media available at a given time. Different drives even from the same manufacturer can varying success with different brands of blank media. You should do a little research www.cdrlabs.com has pretty good reviews, very thorough, of course there are others too.
If you are going to always use the best media you can get then the burner is less significant and may simply burn at a slower than maximum speed, rather than burn a bad disc.

Mark

[Emre Safak]

BenQ and NEC make good burners. I can recommend the BenQ DW1655, which has a useful feature called bit setting and a less useful one called LightScribe.