
- USB 3.1 BEST CONVERTER FOR MAC VIDEOGRAPHER 1080P
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First, the actual speed of the drive being used is important. External-drive performance is determined by two factors. If you don't have space in your computer for internal drives, then you will need to use an external drive. Otherwise, if you need more speed than a single hard drive can deliver at a more reasonable price per GB, then RAID drives can be a great fit. If money is no object, or if you don't need that much storage space, then SSDs are great. A high-end SSD will give you around 400MB/s sustained transfer speed, though at a vastly higher price per GB than a hard-disk drive. However, for video editing, what you really need is a sustained transfer rate, and while SSDs are still faster than hard drives for this, it's not by as much you may have thought. This is excellent for storing operating systems and programs, as they often require accessing large numbers of small files. Aside from speed, their main advantage is their near-instantaneous seek times, as well as their ability to read many small files at nearly the same speed as one large file. SSD drives have a reputation for being much faster than hard-disk drives. While the capacity isn't as high as full-size 3.5" drives (it maxes out at 1TB), it's still larger than most SSD drives and can reliably deliver speeds of around 200MB/s. It is a 10,000 rpm 2.5" drive on a large heat sink designed to fit into 3.5" drive bays. If 150MB/s isn't enough, and you still prefer using a single drive, the WD VelociRaptor is a good choice.

These kinds of drives are often not designed to sustain those speeds. Lower-performance 3.5" drives (or 2.5" drives) are not recommended for video editing, even if their published speeds are fast enough. All of these drives should give you at least 150MB/s of sustained transfer speed for video editing. Some recommended 3.5" drives are the 4TB Western Digital Caviar Black, the 3TB Seagate Barracuda, or the 4TB Hitachi Deskstar. Current high-end 7200 rpm 3.5" drives are able to reliably deliver speeds at 150MB/s or higher, in capacities as high as 4TB, which is enough to play back numerous tracks of lightly compressed video, such as DnxHD or ProRes.

If you will be editing HD content without a huge number of tracks, then a high-performance 3.5" drive will probably be fast enough to meet your needs. Below are a few popular codecs, as well as the amounts of bandwidth they require: However, if you plan on doing multi-camera cutting in real time, or using a large number of layers simultaneously, you are going to need far more. If you will only be doing simple editing with some transitions and text overlays, then twice the bandwidth is probably enough. Once you know how much bandwidth a single track of the codec requires, your next step is to determine how many tracks you are going to need to play back at once.

This tool lets you pick the codec you will be using, and it tells you how much bandwidth a single track of that codec needs in bytes per second. It's also available for iOS in the Apple App Store.
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A handy tool for determining the amount of bandwidth you need is the AJA DataCalc app, which is available for Windows and Mac at AJA's website. XDCAM EX's 35Mb/s is actually only 4.5MB/s. Most codecs rate their speed in bits per second, whereas most hard drives publish their speeds in bytes per second. It's also important not to confuse bits and bytes.
USB 3.1 BEST CONVERTER FOR MAC VIDEOGRAPHER 1080P
1080p ProRes HQ, a popular editing codec, will set you back about 112GB an hour, whereas 1080p AVCHD only takes up about 11GB. The biggest determining factor is what codec and resolution you will be editing in primarily, since the amount of space that different video codecs occupy varies widely.

The first step in choosing a drive is to determine how much storage space you need, as well as how quickly your data can be stored and retrieved. "The first step in choosing a drive is to determine how much storage space you need, as well as how fast your data can be stored and retrieved."
