From: "Tim" <tjp314@pacbell.net>
Date: April 25, 2005 2:00:32 PM MDT
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: No space?? - use an external drive
Troops:
While I just received a new 15" G4 laptop for use at work (with 2GB RAM), my own Mac for
use at home is an old Graphite iMac 400Mhz G3 with 128MB RAM. The internal hard drive
crashed about a year ago, and I'm using an external 60GB Firewire drive for a startup disk.
I realize those specs are below the "minimum" for Astro IIDC, but will it not work at all? ...I
can take my laptop home for imaging, but I won't necessarily have it there all the time.
We've got other Mac laptops floating around, but they're my wife's and daughter's
computers. ...we also have my wife's previous ibook - a clamshell 466Mhz, but it doesn't
have as much RAM as the iMac. ...also, this will affect my "best" registration option for
Astro IIDC, won't it?
-Tim.
--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@o...> wrote:
Hi Alan;
The other nice thing about recording to an external drive is you can
record with your "underpowered" G4 laptop and then simply plug the
external drive into your Desktop Mac without transferring the files
across. On my 100 megabit internal network, it took almost 18 minutes
to move the 10 gigabytes of movies from the laptop to my Desktop Mac
and then took Astro IIDC all of 25 or 30 minutes to stack and align
them.
Also Astro IIDC screams at stacking and aligning on my brand spanking
new G5 2.5 gighz dual, the sharpness estimator runs at about 90 - 100
frames per second for 8 bit monochrome movies. That's largely to the
SATA drive in the G5.
TTYL..
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5
1-(403)-229-9456
milton@o...
www.outcastsoft.com
On 25-Apr-05, at 1:17 PM, Alan Friedman wrote:
Milton -
That is interesting to know.
I usually offload all streams to a desktop or portable firewire drive
as soon as I have processed them (or at least evaluated them) and try
to keep 10 gigs free on my laptop. I have a first generation Titanium
G4 powerbook and I am proud to still be using it (happily) while I
wait for a G5 laptop to be introduced. I used to love getting a new
computer - now I love trying to keep my old one usable for as long as
I can. 8^)
60fps is a disk muncher for sure!! I'm going to learn to live with
8bit and 30fps - for now, anyway...
Alan
On Apr 25, 2005, at 2:33 PM, milton_aupperle wrote:
Hi Folks;
For those of you with very little disk space left - you might want to
consider recording directly to an external USB 2 /
FireWire hard drive - if you hvae one.
For 640x480 30 fps streams of 8 bit video, Astro IIDC requires
sustained transfer rates of 9 megabytes per second and uses 9
megabytes of the theoretical 31.25 FireWire 400 total bandwidth.
A USB 2 hard drive can keep up with this pretty easily (no
competition
for bandwidth on disimilar busses) and so far, I've had absolutely no
problem witha FireWire 400 drive either. I daisy chained them
together
so that the drive was attached to the Mac and the camera was attached
to the hard drive and it did not drop a single frame at 30 fps while
recording.
At larger video sizes or faster frame rates (the PGR Flea cameras can
deliver 60 fps at 640x480 in 8 bit), you'll either have to use USB 2
or add another FireWire bus (PCI for desktop or CardBus for laptops)
as there is not enough bandwidth available on a single
FireWire bus to do both.
Hope that helps..
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5
1-(403)-229-9456
milton@o...
www.outcastsoft.com
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