Re: Can you cut HDV on external Firewire Drive? by Dave Brandt on Nov 7, 2009 at 5:12:50 pm
Yes you can use an External Drive for HDV. Both USB and Firewire are adequate. It is only when you start using multicam features with 6 or more angles that you will find a bottleneck. For normal editing though it is fine.
Re: Can you cut HDV on external Firewire Drive? by Dave Brandt on Nov 7, 2009 at 11:11:09 pm
It is true that Firewire and USB are using different architecture to control data flow, But as I said, Both are adequate. I have many years of experience using external drives for editing in final cut among others and I can say that USB will do the job just fine. I have edited multicamera shoots in HDV with a portable USB hard drive at 5400rpm. When it comes down to it the data rate of HDV is still only around 3.5MB/s
To answer the Original Posters Question if external drives are good enough for HDV I would still have to say YES!