NewEnglandFilm.com

My favorite Uncle Hezekiah Bohush often says, "Good cookin’ and hard drive storage is two things ya can’t have too much of." Which is even more amazing considering he had never even seen a computer the first time he said it. But somehow, he just knew.

Nowadays Uncle Hez is into digital video in a big way, and he needs some pro-level hardware to store all his files for his new documentary, "The Buena Vista Trailer Park Social Club."

Enter Medea. Like its namesake, the helpful sorceress of Colchis, Medea Corporation’s line of digital video storage systems helps moviemakers reach their glory without getting fleeced in the process.

There are, of course, other hard drive manufacturers offering adequate video storage solutions. You can add one or more drives to the inside of your computer. Remember though, never use your system drive for storing and playing digital video. It puts too much strain on your system and you will likely lose video frames in playback or recording.

There’s an easier solution to mucking around the inside of your computer, which no one should ever do (think about it, even cockroaches never wander inside a PC). Get an external hard drive. Now external doesn’t mean you should leave it outside next to your leaking "Die Hard" and the spare tire from your dearly departed 1972 Chevy Vega. External means that it hangs around next to your computer, like your dog hangs around next to the kitchen table. A better term might be a parasitic accessory, since an external computer device draws its life from a connection to the host computer. But I suppose marketing nixed the idea of selling parasites in favor of calling them external drives.

One of the absolute best external drives to get for video editing is the Medea VideoRaid*, on the big web at www.medeacorp.com. VideoRaids are specially configured for computer-based video editing. RAID is an FLA (four-letter acronym) that stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. What you get is a stack of two or four hard drives mounted inside a rugged case, about the size of a shoebox (sorry, ShoeBox), that act like one big old speedy hard drive.

*Catchy name. You may recall that in a past article I described how companies name their NewProducts, by combining TwoWords without a space BetweenThem and capitalizing BothWords. Cultural anthropologists will note that this is an effective StreamLining of the way we called things in the 1960s, when we often used three words instead of two, such as KuklaFranOllie, BlahBlahBlah and YadaYadaYada. Or the 1940s, when we combined up to seven words, such as HiDeHiDeHiDeHo. From seven down to two in sixty years is real social progress. Why, within ten years, I predict that companies will actually use only one word to describe their products. But I digress. Again.

Medea’s drives are super fast and wicked easy to set up on a Mac and fairly easy to set up on a PC with the included drivers. The SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy") drives can be attached to either a Mac or PC, but must be formatted to one or the other in order to use. Windows users will need to format their RAID drives using File Allocation Table partitions. This means they will have a hard drive that is both FAT and Redundant (proceed cautiously when describing your purchase requests to management, they may think you are talking about them).

I tested a four-drive, 100 GB drive VideoRaid. Yes, that’s 100 GIGabytes. Remember Uncle Hez’s philosophy? You get about three to four minutes of video footage per gigabyte. So, 30 GB would hold about 100 minutes of video, enough for a short feature film. But remember, all editing software applications create LOTS of additional files for transitions, filters, etc., plus you’ll be adding music, sound effects, graphics, and other files. So figure two minutes per gig to determine how much storage you’ll need for your projects. With the 100 GB Medea drive, I have enough space to work comfortably on one feature and probably a couple of short videos. And I couldn’t be happier with its performance. I love this hard drive*!

*Did I just say that? I’m working too hard.

With video editing, speed is the thing. I tried other, slower drives, and they just weren’t fast enough to spit out a long video stream without dropping frames (not a good thing). Medea is one of the only companies that bundle two or four drives in a case so that both disks record and play back data, which results in very fast data rates. Their Zone Stripe Technology (proprietary magic) ensures that the video files will be streamed out to your system or to tape at a consistent speed, something that a single hard drive cannot do.

You could get a single drive, external or internal, and maybe have 90 percent success with it (if that’s good enough). Just get one with a spin rate of 7200 or 10,000 RPMs. SCSI drives are faster than IDE if you want to install one inside your G4 or PC, but you’ll also need to install a SCSI card (you need one with the Medea VideoRaid drives too until they make a firewire model.) Multiple VideoRaids can be connected together for massive storage space and even faster data transfer rates. The SCSI VideoRaids claim a sustained data transfer rate of 36 MB/second, while their "RT" drives achieve up to 55 MB/second. Take my word for it, it’s fast enough to stream out your video with never a dropped frame.

Like any pre-configured RAID drives, Medea VideoRaids cost a bit more than you’d pay by getting a single hard drive off Ebay, but you don’t have to tear apart your computer to install it. And their customer service team is courteous and helpful. Medea regularly changes the storage sizes of its disks, so check their web site for the latest offerings. One thing I have seen is that their packages keep getting better (faster with more storage) while their prices have remained consistently affordable.

Perfect for corporate or commercial applications. Affordable for indie moviemakers and serious home hobbyists. I highly recommend the Medea VideoRaids. And if you won’t take my word for it, Uncle Hezekiah recommends ’em, too. And he’ll probably play at Sundance before I will!