5400 RPM Hard Drives and Analog Video Capture

Hi

I hope someone here knowledgeable in editing video on computers can help me.

I’m looking at getting a notebook computer to use for analog video capture, editing, and burning to DVD. I was wondering if a 5400 RPM hard drive has adequate data writing speed for smooth analog video capture, or do I need to have a 7200 RPM hard drive for this? Hope this question makes sense.

Thanks in advance.
Rayt

 

It depends on the resolution. Even 1080i is only 20Mbps so any modern hard drive can handle it.
Unless you're dealing with insanely high resolutions, it should not be a problem.

 

Thanks for the quick response. My videos are in standard definition so it sounds like there won't be an issue.

 

I had a 4200rpm HDD and even that was enough for this. Yes, you should be fine.

 

Thanks jessi3k3! Good to know.

 

You're better off to have a drive separate from the drive your OS is on, but 5400 should be fine. I capture with a Hauppauge PVR USB2 all the time, even now while typing. If you need uncompressed video you pretty much need RAID but if you're capturing DV from a CamCorder or other pre-compressed video ( my PVR is MPEG2) you'll do fine.

 

olyteddy

Thanks for your input. I've tried video capture from my standard definition analog video camera to an external 7200 RPM hard drive which does not have the OS on it. It is connected to the computer by a USB2 port. However, video capture was not smooth at all. It skipped chunks of video every few seconds, so the recording was very jumpy. That's why I abandoned using the external hard drive and do all my video capture on the internal hard drive. If I'm doing something wrong, I'll be glad to hear any advice on how to fix it. The video capture software I use is Pinnacle Studios 9, and I capture the analog video through a Pinnacle Studio Moviebox Deluxe. This system is probably about 2-1/2 years old, so maybe technology has improved a lot since then.

Thanks,
Rayt

 

Your problem is sharing a USB bus over the hard drive and video capture card at the same time.

 

Yeah, I used to use a FireWire enclosure to capture to.