You only need it for capture, so when capturing one reel at a time, and with lossless compression, you can get away with using that drive. You just capture until the drive is 80% full, and then copy it off to HDD storage, and then delete it and continue your capture.
poita, thanks for sharing all this info. Its great to read.
Mind if I ask some questions:
What format are you capturing in; Tiff? I assume the full bit depth of the camera, 12-bit?
With the earlier mention of lossless compression, I am wondering what capture format is ideal as well.
Why are you triggering the LED light source instead of leaving it always on? Is it to save on the life of the LED?
I think I can help on this one. If your film motion is continuous through your scanning rig with a constant light source and no shutter, your scan will be streaked as the film is pulled through the projector gate. The reason for triggering the LED light source is to freeze the film image in the gate for the imaging sensor. It works on the same principle as a flash photo that freezes action. (This flashing must be synchronized with the image capturing sensor, lest you capture half of one frame, the other half of the next frame, and the frameline between them.) If the motion of the film through the scanner is intermittent, that is, if the frames stops in the gate for a moment in the same fashion that a movie camera briefly stops each frame in the gate and then opens its shutter to make an exposure (often 1/48th second for 24FPS photography), theoretically you might be able to get away with a constant light source. http://forums.kinograph.cc/t/image-sensor-optical-components/44/37