In the Cinema Studies program, you will have to opportunity to take several production classes. In these classes, you will be handling and editing large video files.
You will need a “working drive” you can bring to class, bring to the lab, and that you can edit on. You will likely be doing much of your coursework on the computers in the lab which will not save your files between sessions. Thus you will need an external drive to ensure that you don’t lose your work when editing on lab computers.
General Recommendations
We recommend Solid State Drives (SSDs) because they have very fast read and write speeds. This means you will spend less time waiting for your files to load when editing. That being said, you can edit from a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) although it will be a slower process.
***Important Note: do not try to edit your projects from an SD card. They have EXTREMELY low transfer rates and you will be very sad while waiting for your projects to load.
For most students, all of the Cinema Studies coursework should fit on a 500 GB external drive. However if you are planning on also working on personal projects, you may consider purchasing an SSD with 1 TB of storage.
If you find yourself doing A LOT of work or wanting to back up your files, we recommend buying a large external HDD (> 1TB) in addition to an SSD. In this scenario, you would still be editing off the SSD but you could offload inactive projects to the HDD. You could also perform automatic backups so that you and your classmates are protected in the event of a drive failure.
Be sure to check that the drive you are purchasing has ports which are compatible with your computer AND the lab computers. The lab computers have USB-A and USB-C ports available.
To find out how much storage you are likely to need for a given class, we recommend first checking the class syllabus and then asking your Professor.
If you are interested in pursuing a career in A/V production, we recommend learning how to estimate the amount of storage you will need for a given project.
Slightly More Specific Recommendations
We recommend drives made by the following companies (in no particular order):
- LaCie
- Western Digital
- Samsung
- Seagate
We have heard of people having issues with SanDisk drives in our classes.
In general, we do not recommend drives from less well-known manufacturers.
You can purchase external drives in from these vendors:
- Amazon.com
- B&H Photo Video
- Newegg.com
This page was written by André Sirois, Kevin May, and Mason Kline for the University of Oregon Cinema Studies Program and is published under Creative Commons license (CC BY NC SA 3.0)