That's why your external drives should be eSATA drives. Hot on/off and full internal speed in an external drive. For those of you that don't know, eSATA uses a connector cable like a USB cable but the cable is a SATA cable and the port runs off your SATA controller. External drives are cool now.

My motherboard (ASUS P5Q Deluxe) came with one built in port that's part of the backplate connections. I'm pretty sure eSATA ports will become very standard soon.

This is my new external drive:
$119
750GB
USB 2.0 / Firewire / eSATA
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154293

Chrickie!

A few weeks ago I went and bought a 250GB external hard drive (Western Digital with USB 2.0) purely for the sole use of storing my SD9 files and creating my DVD from the external drive for PD6. As per one of my previous posts, I learnt how to transfer the project and all it's contents to my external drive (File/Export/Pack Project Materials).

I only have an 80GB internal drive of which only 47GB is available, this will get swallowed up in no time if I have to rely on that. So what am I going to do now if the external drive is not reliable? Can I still store my SD9 files in the external drive but create my project with my internal drive and edit/produce/create from there?

Hi Bobby,

I store all my projects, video clips, music etc. on an external hard drive, when I need to use them I just copy them back into C: drive.
If you have packed your project for export, store them on your external drive, then copy back to C:drive when needed for further editing.

Robert Intel i7 930, 16GB ram, Radeon HD 5770 1Gb,Ver. 14.12 Win7 64 bit
Intel i7 7700 HQ, 16 GB ram Nvidia GTX 1050Ti 4GB dual drives 1 TB SSD + 1 TB HDD Win 10

PDtoots

Thanks Robert
Each one of my boys soccer games is about 4GB worth X about 20 games, there goes my C drive. I won't be able to move it from my C drive after I have imported into PD because as you know, it only recognises its original source. Or have I missunderstood something here?

PS. another hot one in Melbourne today eh?

Hi Bobby,

Pack your projects for export and save to your external drive, you can then remove the source files from your C: drive, make sure you have a back up of your source files on your external drive.

Then just copy the packed project back into C: drive for editing.

Robert Intel i7 930, 16GB ram, Radeon HD 5770 1Gb,Ver. 14.12 Win7 64 bit
Intel i7 7700 HQ, 16 GB ram Nvidia GTX 1050Ti 4GB dual drives 1 TB SSD + 1 TB HDD Win 10

PDtoots

I think I understand the process now but does this mean I will need to repeat this process every week as I import the next weeks game?

Bobby,

Its possible you may be able to work with your setup, as is. There are a lot of factors that go into the whole video producing process. If you are not having problems with your setup, go ahead and use the USB drive. If you experience problems, you know where to look first.

Some external USB drives have an eSATA port which is way faster than USB, but your PC would also have to have an eSATA port.

Consider adding a 2nd internal drive to your PC. They are cheap nowdays, and will yield far faster video handling than the external USB. Pretty easy to install in many cases. Full Terabyte sized drives are almost under $100 US these days. Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Thank you all for your input, I think to be on the safe side I will have to edit 2 seperate projects, one straight from the ex drive and one using Robert's suggestion of packing the project for export. It's a little frustrating for me in that I won't know the results until the end of the year when it comes to producing/burning after the final game.

Thanks again.

Hi Bobby,

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but if you shoot a single game, say week1, make a working PD folder, say, soccer, on the internal drive, open a PD project, edit and produce, say, to mpeg you end up with a week1.pds, and week1.mpg with a load of week1 raw assets. You can pack that project to your external drive or if you're careful just copy the lot across into, say week1 folder.

If you need to reedit etc you can (after emptying the soccer folder) copy the contents of week1 (external drive) into the now empty soccer folder and repeat the process as they are still in their source location, albeit having been on holiday on the external drive.

If you use the same process for week2 -20 you end up with 20 .pds files, 20 edited mpgs and 20 sets of organised raw assets all stored and organised on the external drive in 20 folders..

The final video can be made with the 20 weekly mpgs as, say finishedgames.pds, again copied into the working soccer folder and either produced to file or disc etc.

That way you get to see each game etc etc before finally putting it all together.

If you're really organised you could also make highlight edits for each week in a similar way, and assemble 20 lots of highlights at the end as well.

If I've read it wrong - sorry.

Cheers
Adrian

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

You've read it correctly Adrian, and thanks.
What I was hoping to do was import each weeks game and whittle it down to say 4-5 minutes of footage ending up with about 40 minutes by the end of the season. The problem here is that it won't be consecutive.

Eg. in my final video I want say 5-10 mins of shots over the bar, 5-10 mins of crash n' burn, 5-10 mins of goals etc etc all grouped together. So I will be sorting each snippet from each game into their correct positioning in the final video.

I know you guys have explained it as simply as possible for me but as I'm not that savvy, I'm still struggling a bit, I'm still green. I did this very type of thing last year but my other DVD video camera produced much smaller files and I was able to store it all on my internal hard drive and produced it from there.

I'm happy to see this thread as I'm beginning to edit 6 weeks of lecture and I have a LOT of footage. This is my first video project and I could use some help.

Could someone please spell out exactly how to 'pack' a project so that it can be moved to and external drive?

Could someone also please spell out exactly how to 'unpack' a project in case their needs to be reediting?

I'm also curious why the .pds file gets locked into this original source location. Why can't you just browse to a different location for the source file when launching the .pds from a different location? This seems like a limitation.

Thanks for your help.

Hi Derek,

This might explain the way .pds files work?

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/6504.page

Pack project:

Directors chair>file>export>pack> choose location

In effect it produces a 'portable' project with all source assets and the .pds file.

Edit:
Before you get really started, it will be worth your while to look at the varied tutorials here:
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/3523.page

Cheers
Adrian
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Thanks for your fast response Adrian!

I now 'get' what is going on, and between the packing option and your detailed explanation of how the .pds file works (in the discussion link you sent), I'm comfortable moving forward with a good backup/portability strategy for my project.

I been reading through a lot of postings and watching the you tube videos as well; all are very helpful.

Looking forward to learning more.

Thanks again,
Derek