AlBook HD too slow for video?

ast3r3x

I made a title in livetype, and rendered it. It was 275mb for 10seconds. When I tried to play it in quicktime it would skip, because I think my HD isn't fast enough. When I took it over to my brothers quicksilver it played fine. Why is this? I wanted to start to do video work, but I'm not sure I'll be able to if my movies are skipping when I try to play them.



1) Yes I used the word skippy

2)Any Ideas?

giant

You have to compress it or it will skip. You're talking about almost 30 MB a second. Do the math.

ast3r3x

How do I compress it without it getting to low quality?

kiwi-in-dc

Quote:

Originally posted by ast3r3x

How do I compress it without it getting to low quality?

I'm assuming you're using FCE or FCP. Make sure the sequence you're placing the livetype into is set for a compressed format e.g. one of the DV formats or MJPEG with a bit rate around 3.5Mbps.



FYI, I used my brand new PB 17" (with stock 4200RPM drive) for the first time yesterday to capture video live as I shot it. No problems with dropped frames on capture, plays back fine,

trowa

you need a HD that has at least 7200 RPM's. While you can feasibly do video work on 4200/5400 HD's, don't expect to get speeds like a desktop.



most powerbooks come with 4200 or 5400. Hitachi makes the only notebook HD that runs at 7200 that I know of.



If you are doing serious video work get the hitachi drive and hook up a FW800 external drive for rendering/compression. Striped (2 external HD's linked as one) would be even better.

giant

Quote:

Originally posted by ast3r3x

How do I compress it without it getting to low quality?

Depends on what you are using. I only recently upgraded to FCP 4, but I'm pretty sure Compressor has allows you to preview just like Cleaner does. You should get familiar with Compressor and do it in there.



In the past, I've always exported from FCP or AE with a high quality codec and then compressed in it Cleaner. No matter how you will lose some quality. Of course, it doesn't take very high quality video to look good on a TV. Even on a computer, most of what you make doesn't need to be very big or high quality.



Play around with the settings and get a feel for it. If the finished video skips when played off of the laptop drive, you need to compress it. It doesn't need to be such a big file.



You probably will want to get a good big firewire drive at some point, but you should still edit with the goal of having it play smoothly on a slower computer with a slower HD.

trublue

If you have File Vault on, deactivate it!



I just bought a 1.33 GHZ 17" Powerbook with the stock 4200 RPM HD and couldn't import in iMovie.



Talk about frustrating. I couldn't figure it out. I could view it just fine, but I was dropping frames like mad. It was crazy. The longest that I could capture for was 5-6 seconds...and even that was choppy.



Then someone tipped me off to deactivate File Vault.



I did, then restarted.



Problem solved. My disk performance was back on par.



I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but i think that it is noteworthy.



Deactivate File Vault or suffer pretty bad disk performance.



Hope that this helps.



-Ian

tak1108

Live Type exports out with the Animation Codec. You need to convert that to DV NTSC (for america) (DV Pal) for most everywhere else. export it from quicktime to DV NTSC, or export it from Final Cut.

trowa

if you are using panther (or jaguar), you might want to turn off journaling as well. I've heard that that may play some part in dropped frames.



I'm still running jaguar with journaling off, so I can't really verify that.