CompuServe Messages

Russ has the right tack on the video clips issue. When you record a clip, and then do make clip without moving the sliders, all that actually has to occur is changing the name of the new recording from the temporary name given to every fresh recording to the permanent file name you have entered. If you move the sliders, then a new clip is created by copying the portion you have selected to a new file. The temp file is then deleted. A file name change is instant, the copy takes as much time as recording, again because the drives are working at their limit when recording or playing back video. The file sizes are huge. Audio file sizes are tiny in comparison, so that while a 9G drive holds only 48 minutes of video, a 2G drive will hold hours of audio. When copying files, the drive work at their fastest available speed, which will be the write speed of the target drive. A five-minute HQ5 video clip requires a drive speed of about 5 megs per second to record or to play and will take up close to a gigabyte of space. Since any drive out right now that does HQ5 is right at the threshold for HQ5, i.e. 5M/sec is the drive's top speed, then the time it would take to copy the file drive to drive is going to equal the time it takes to play the clip. A five-minute audio-only clip is only going to be about 60MB. If the drive copies at 5M/sec, that takes 12 seconds to copy. So the difference you see in copy times between a five-minute video clip and a five-minute audio clip is the difference in the time it takes to copy one gigabyte of data vs the time it takes to copy 60MB of data. Chuck.