Hello everyone, I was wondering if I can get some advice for setting up a Final Cut Pro system, my friend finally brought her video camera so were ready to start shooting and making student movies for film festivals , its DV( I pray to god, she says it is) so it will hook up to Firewire, now here is my current disk situation and what Im trying to figure out. Before I do, my system is an iMac G5 ALS w/2Ghz G5 and 2Gigs RAM, I love 2000 .

Internal Hard Disk-->Maxtor 7Y250M0
Space--> 250GB(233.76GB) @1 Partition w/Mac OS X 10.4.8
Free Space--> ~230GB

FireWire Disk-->LaCie External Drive
Space--> 150GB(149.1GB) @ 1 Partition w/Mac OS X 10.4.8
Free Space--> ~125GB

I mainly use my FireWire drive as the startup disk as Im a performance freak and let nothing bad touch my internal drive, thats why theres nothing really on the internal disk. I like to test out and play with software and games and if it doesnt screw up the system, I'll send it over to the internal drive. I start up from my internal disk to play games as its VERY tuned and fast, as in no junk, no file defragmentation etc, yeah Ive heard that Mac defragmentation doesnt exist, but it does. iDefrag is a very good product that works, and it does increase speed of the OS and everything else, so there.

So Im trying to figure out two things, first where I should install Final Cut Studio, its 5.1, its LEGAL as in I bought it for the academic price of $550 so im going to get my freaking moneys worth out of it even if it kills me.

Second, Im not sure where I should put my scratch disks, Im not doing anything high definition, probably just DV quality, or regular standard def 27.97fps max.

Im thinking of this arrangement
Internal Disk-->keep it this way, no touchies
LaCie FireWire Disk-->format it, and use just for scratch files, rendering. NO OS.
Some Cheaper Firewire Disk-->use it as my play disk like my LaCie disk was before, have Final Cut Studio installed here.

Im thinking this because I want to avoid touching my internal disk as little as possible as it will be a lot harder to replace, then just a norml firewire disk. and its already showing signs of wear (finding bad blocks) .

If anyone has suggestions, advice etc please I need to know as once we start filming, I cant have any computer troubles. Thanks

mmm your system disk should have the FCP installation is much more faster, but if you prefer toplay games... is your shoot

your right, so i threw Final Cut onto my Hard Drive and its very snappy . I did realize I do have to put all my media files, renderings etc onto the external drive because when I get my MBP soon, I will need to be able to easily transfer the files and projects between the two systems. Firewire isnt that slow and by already doing some tests, it can handle at least DV video capturing, rendering with ease.

Its magic

Try external eSATA
thers a pcmcia card for the mbp
thats really fast

external eSATA? ive never heard of it, but I'll have to look into it.

so I would buy one of those, then connect it through the express card slot on the mbp then?