Chapter 3: Installing AVoption|V10
21
Formatting Hard Drives
Format your hard drives as NTFS using Windows
Disk Administrator. Striped drives are supported
for video, but not for audio.
On Windows systems, audio drives must be for-
matted as “Basic” or Pro Tools won't recognize
them as valid audio drives.
Video drives to be included in video stripe sets
must be formatted as “Dynamic.” 1:1 video re-
quires a 2-drive striped set.
Using Two Hard Drives
For scenarios that do not require a high audio
track count or a very long video segment, you
may use two hard drives.
In this scenario, one drive is used to record, im-
port, and play back audio data, and the other is
used to do the same for video.
Using More Than Two Hard Drives
To get the best possible performance from your
Pro Tools|HD system with AVoption|V10, you
should use more than two hard drives. In this
scenario, you should use striped hard drives for
video data. Striped volumes appear to Pro Tools
as a single volume.
Audio
Both Pro Tools and Media Station|V10
software can store audio data to multiple hard
drives. You should allocate audio tracks to dif-
ferent hard drives manually. “Round robin” disk
allocation is not recommended in a system that
includes video drives. For more information, see
the
Pro Tools Reference Guide
.
Video
Media Station|V10 software can capture
contiguous video to multiple hard disks. This is
useful if the length of your video session exceeds
the storage space available on a single drive. For
example, 26 minutes of video material, using
3:1 compression, requires approximately
11.1 GB of storage space.
Striped Drive Requirements
(Video Storage Only)
Striped
drives are configured so that multiple
hard drives behave as if they are one hard drive.
This makes higher data throughput possible. Re-
quirements will vary depending on the drives.
For example, the 5th-Generation DigiDrives™
(released November 2001) require 2-way striped
drive sets when capturing or playing uncom-
pressed (1:1) video. For earlier generations of
drives, 4- way striped drives or greater (4 or more
drives acting as one) are required when captur-
ing or playing uncompressed (1:1) video; and 2-
way striped drives (2 drives acting as one) are re-
quired when capturing or playing 2:1 and 3:1
compressed video.
For the latest information on supported
storage configurations, be sure to check the
AVoption|V10 compatibility pages on the
Digidesign Web site (www.digide-
sign.com/compato).
Striped drives are supported for video only.
Striped drives are not supported for audio
record and playback.
Complete storage requirements for different
video resolutions are available on the Avid
Web site (www.avid.com).
