On Tue, 17 Oct 2000 07:11:09 -0700, "L Swerdlove" wrote:

>I'm using a DV200, Premiere 5.1c on a Gateway PIII 550. I have 2 IDE hard
>drives plugged into a Promise Ultra 666 ATA controller card - a Quantum
>Fireball 20 gig 7200 rpm and a Maxtor 40 gig 7200 rpm. The system has 384
>mb RAM. I can capture video flawlessly, but I can't output to tape. My
>project plays for about 1 minute then the NTSC monitor (connected through
>the camera) goes blank. The tech guys at Pinnacle say my hard drive isn't
>fast enough to stream the video (even though the specs are above the
>minimum). The diagnostics that come with the card say the Maxtor drive
>(which I use exclusively for my media files including preview files) gets a
>write speed of 27.1 MByte/s and a read speed of 26.9.
>
>I tried installing a faster controller card (a SIIG Ultra ATA100) and it
>improved things - I could stream video for 8-10 minutes without bombing out.
>I want to solve this problem.
>
>The Pinnacle folks say I need a SCSI hard drive and controller. The
>cheapest setup I've found is about $250 for an 18 gig SCSI drive and $90 for
>a controller card. But the salesman says I should go cheap for video and
>recommends a $350 IBM 18 gig drive and a $350 Adaptec controller card. Is
>this neccessary?
>
>Also, what about setting up an IDE RAID? A Promise FastTrak 100 sells for
>about $120. Would this work better? Worse?

None of the above is needed - this is Mini-DV, and
3.6MB/sec (+ maybe a bit to spare) is all that is
needed to input/output Mini-DV. You can use the 20-gig
split into a program drive and partition(s) for anything
else you want (though ideally probably not for most
video files, unless they are source material which will
be rendered into other files...). You may want to place
the preview files on this drive, though (maybe in its
own partition). Use the other drive (not in a RAID) for
most of your video files. 128-megs of RAM is OK, 256
may be better, but more is overkill (I just took 128
megs out of my computer, since it was unnecessary).
The DV200 (and DPS Spark) were early Adaptec cards,
and Adaptec's recommendations on HD requirements
were extreme overkill (that cost me a lot of money
unnecessarily - I wish I'd tried my 8-gig UDMA 33
IBM "C" drive for capture-play before buying the
expensive SCSI drives [it worked fine for record/
play, even as a "C" drive almost full of video
files...]). The problem lies elsewhere, not with the
drives you have. With the DPS version of your card,
BTW, I made the edited video into a series of 9-minute
AVI files that I then output to the camera from a
Spark playlist, rather than trying to output from
the Premiere timeline. (Also, BTW, the Raptor card is
about $370 without Premiere, and it will reliably
play edited video from the Premiere timeline...)
Good luck!