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External hard drive / FCE guide

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I have recently purchased a panasonic HDC SD200 camcorder and after previous advice have ordered the bottom spec 21.5" imac with FCE preinstalled for editing. Should I buy an external hard drive to do this or will the system alone be fine? If I should what would you recommend? Only going to use it to edit family video's. I wouldn't really want to spend more than £150 on one. Also can anyone recommend a good FCE guide. I've never attempted video editing before. Thanks
 
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I would get an external drive, make sure it's chassis supports firewire for the best editing experience. I know it's an annoyance, but you really don't want to be editing using your internal boot drive as the scratch disk. Plus, if you're editing HD footage, you'll find yourself eating your hard drive space real quick.

I don't know what's available in your area, but you should be able to get a large drive (1tb 7200rpm) and a firewire chassis for < $200, although I don't know the exchange rate, but I think that's within your budget.

A guy who has some great videos has a free video and written content short course on getting started with FCE. The only negative is I think he doesn't deal with importing footage from a camera as he supplies you with some footage and tells you how to import that footage into the project he guides you thru. You can get his tutorial here:

Learn Final Cut Express 4 - Izzy Video
 
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Get a Mercury FW800 1TB drive form Other World Computing (.com), as you can NOT edit with FCE or FCS from the system drive. It's against Apple's own specs. This is because a hard drive has a limited data bandwidth. The OS and Final Cut will eat up the system drive's bandwidth. The video streams from your media will quickly eat up another drive's bandwidth. FW800 is the minimum for video editing. If you're using a flavor of HD, you may want to capture all of your video as Pro Res (which I'm not sure FCE supports). As HDV, AVCHD, and other Long-GOP formats will not edit well on FW drives, and need SATA drives.

Also, be sure you have as much RAM in that puppy as you can afford. 4GB bare bones minimum, 8GB preferable, the more the better.
 
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FCE uses AIC, not ProRES - ProRES is only available in FCP.
 
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I will be using final cut express and the footage from my camera is AVCHD. From what you said does that mean I need a SATA drive or will a FW800 be good. Sorry, I am reasonably up on my gadgets and tech but have never looked into hard drives before.
 
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After a very quick google search, how about a 1 TB tripple FW800 FreeAgent desk for mac? Any thoughts?
 
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Or the 500GB FreeAgent go pro. Would make it easier to take to my work to back up my mac there?
 
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Forget the freeagent go pro. I've just seen mobileme! That will do nicely for backing up work info
 
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mobileme only provides 10 gig of storage, it's ok for backing up certain stuff, but it's definitely not for using for video editing.

The FW800 freeagent should work fine as long as you make sure the HD in it is a 7200rpm.
 
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Thanks. Sorry for any confusion. Will only use video editing at home so will not use mobile me for that, just for word documents. Was going to get the small freeagent go to transfer files from work to home but no need with mobile me.
 
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This thread raises a question that I've faced as well, though slightly off topic from this one here--it it's addressed elsewhere in the forums, let me know. I've looked but haven't seen it thus far.

Just FYI: I have a 2007 MacBook.

My issue: I would love to edit FCE files on my external drive (I've thus far been using my internal hard drive), but when I save files in FCE, they automatically save to my desktop. Is there a way to change my settings to save to the external drive? I realize the external drive will have be connected to my computer first, of course, but how to I get it to save to the external drive automatically when it's connected?

There is another, linked issue--once I save FCE files, if I try to move them, I can no longer open them in FCE. If anyone can help with this, I'd appreciate it as well.

I'm new to the forums, so let me know if I'm doing this wrong. Your help is appreciated. Thanks!
 

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