Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 465

Donation sent. Greetings from Germany!

Harmy, just throwing my 2cents in here. I'm an video editor by trade and we exclusively use Western Digital Green drives at work. I edit off of them daily and they've never let me down. We have 50 or so of them in regular use at the office.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236404

Don't get me wrong, WD Caviar black drives are fantastic, high performance drives, I have a couple of those too, but for work we edit and archive with the green drives and they perform fantastically. We use the 2TB models (link above) and have found them to be very reliable and reasonably fast. There's also a 3TB version on sale for $114.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136874

I agree about staying away from the Red NAS drives. The Green's are a great low cost, reliable alternative.

Donation Sent. Thanks from The U.S.A.

Donation sent, good luck and keep up the good work!

FYI: I only happened to stumble here this morning, maybe a Harmy's newsletter update with DVD status and donation appeal?

You might be surprised what kind of response you get :D

I promise I won't beat a dead horse here :)

The Green drives use "Intelipower" technology to adjust RPM as needed, so the drive doesn't spin at speeds unnecessary to the task. That's why while I'm editing off of them, they perform at full speed (forgive me I don't actually know the max RPM) and then spin down when not needed. As I say, we use them all the time, and I trust their reliability, but that's me. I do have a couple of Black drives, and my experience with editing off of them is that because they run at a much higher RPM whenever they're in use, they get quite hot. I did a 5 hour render of a feature length film on a Black drive and it was uncomfortably hot to touch by the time it finished. I haven't noticed any speed differences using the Green drives, that is to say that they perform just as well as far as I can tell with read/write times. I do long renders on them too, but they do stay a lot cooler and as I say I haven't found any reliability issues whatsoever. 

As far as the Red drives go, I have no personal experience with them, I've always heard that they're somehow optimized for NAS use, so I just stuck with Green and Black drives.

I'd say if you can afford it and want the absolute best performance, absolutely go with the Black. However, if price point is indeed a worry, I wouldn't dismiss the Green drives due to the fact that they are "low power" because they are indeed reliable for video editing.

Green I mostly use on my fileserver for stuff I infrequently access, not sure how great they'd be for more demanding work.  They run mostly about 5400rpm, which is fine but not amazing, and will never scale up to 7200rpm speeds even with "intelipower".  They're about the most mainstream consumer drive WD offers, and you'd absolutely have to run an endurance test on it before trusting data to it.  They stay darned cool, though, which should not be easily dismissed.

Red seems to be built for reliable 24/7 operation, and should be a decent option, it also uses "intelipower", so it won't be as consistently fast as Black, but probably a step up in speed from Green, and probably a little better built.

Black is 7200rpm all the time and prioritizes reads or writes on the fly to whatever it detects you're trying to do, they are performance oriented and cost more (I was confused earlier about whether black or red cost more, now I know), they're fast but do run darned hot if your case cooling isn't really well thought out.

One thing to consider about all of these drives is whether there's a difference in warranty between them.

In the end, Green is nice for storage/backups, and can be used just fine for your encodes, but isn't the best designed drive for it (maybe pick one up on the cheap to back everything up to; redundancy is good).

Red might be the best bet, be it for storage or encoding, as it is cheaper than Black, but still performance oriented and possibly better constructed than consumer drives.  Red may be better warrantied than Green, too, though, classically, Black has been better warrantied than Red.

As I mentioned quickly earlier, I've actually been making my way through the original Japanese dub, and while I'm generally [make that "genuinely"] never a fan of dubbing (of any kind), I'm truly impressed with the effort of this early dub.  In no way can it compete with the original audio, of course, but it is amazing how complete the dub is for the time, every non-articulated bit is spot on, from music through wookie, and boy does the translation seem to be accurate (from what my limited skills can discern), plus the voices aren't all that off, and the performances are spirited.  This has gotten me to think of what an amazing language tool the DeEd can represent.  For anyone who knows what SHOULD be said [by heart], if the translation is at all accurate [like the Japanese is], then watching the DeEd in that chosen language should be a good test of one's progress in interpreting the spoken dialect.

What do you all think?  Great test of learned language skills or what?

(Mala approves, shouldn't you?)

Donated. You clearly deserve it. You're doing a wonderful job.

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Oh, that makes more sense, thanks CatBus.  I was thinking it was surprisingly, almost impossibly good for something churned out quickly for a theatrical release ~'78.  I wonder if back in VHS days they offered an English with subtitles version as well as this dubbed version.  The dub I could see being good for children, but it would have sucked for anyone older to be the only way to watch it until the SE DVD's came out (just remembered there was also LaserDisc... I wonder how audio and subtitles were handled on that).

Probably my last Japanese question for a while, but since you seem to be knowledgeable about these things, might you be able to say how long after Star Wars came out in American theaters did it take to get into foreign markets such as Japan?  While Star Wars undoubtedly swept the globe in its day, I don't know how long it really took to reach most non-US markets, since I don't think they expected it to be a hit, so I have doubts that they had many dubs or subtitle translations prepared by the time of the US release.  I could be wrong, but I imagine there was quite a scramble to disseminate it globally after premiered so strongly.

Side note: dear God I leave for Japan a week from today!  Somebody pinch me (not you Frink).

In Japan (nowadays, anyway), foreign movies are usually simultaneously screened in dubbed editions 'for kids', and subbed editions 'for adults'. There are a lot of practical issues associated with subbing titles directed at kids (varying levels of reading ability among the target audience, having to clutter up the subs with tons of furigana, etc.), issues which go beyond 'kids are lazy and don't want to read', lol. Nowadays, films generally get simultaneous international releases due to American studios having deals with international studios, better translation pipelines, etc. but I'm not sure what the pipeline would have looked like in the 80's.

(Where in Japan are you going? I lived in Hatogaya-shi/Kawaguchi-shi, Saitama-ken for a year when I was attending Jouchi.)

Yeah, I'm all pinched out at the moment.