i’ve been spending the day cleaning up around the house and watching movies. i’m bringing out some of the classics. the first movie i broke out was “she’s all that”. it’s still as good as the first time i saw it.

and now i’m watching “win a date with tad hamilton” and i just saw my favorite scene in the movie.

pete: tad she is a wonderful person with a huge heart…and the kind of beauty that a guy sees only once, you know, once. listen, tad, if there’s even a chance that you could break her heart, for her sake, walk away, man.

tad: i could never break rosalee’s heart. ok

pete: good. because if you do, i swear to god, i will tear you to pieces with my bare hands…or vicious rhetoric.

oh…it turns out that i must have liked the line a lot the first time around because i blogged about it before.

now that i am starting to fiddle with video, i’m starting to realize that i really need massive amounts of hard drive space for all of this video editing and storage.

after doing some research, i have come to a couple of conclusions. first off, let me describe my current world. the motherboard i have comes with 4 internal SATA ports and 1 eSATA port. this would seem like more ports than anyone would need unless you are crazy like me.

currently, i have a boot drive and a DVD drive taking up 2 of the internal SATA ports leaving me with two ports internally. i will probably end up getting two more internal drives and stripe them for storage. that really only affords me 4TB of storage in system.

in my network, i have a 3TB NAS and a 2TB NAS currently being used as slow storage. the primary NAS rsyncs with the secondary one so that i have some redundancy. i’m not sure if this is enough storage now that video is being introduced into the mix. with my images it was more than enough space.

i’ve been reading about eSATA enclosures and it looks like enclosures that use port multipliers allow multiple drives per enclosure at the expense of performance. maybe this is ok for permanent storage, but not good enough to be a working disk.

the other option is to get an enclosure that has multiple eSATA ports, one for each drive. that would work except i don’t have many eSATA ports available, which means that i would need to find an eSATA add-on card that works in my system. i think i will deal with that when that day comes.

i’m going to see how long the 2x2TB drives will last me for. i was hoping to do a windows install on one of those drives too, so that’ll take some space away from my storage.

EDIT: just opened the case and saw that the machine has 6 internal SATA ports. maybe i can just cram a bunch of drives into this machine after all.

now that i have a mac, there are so many tools that i have available to me that i have not had before. this is both exciting and overwhelming.

i imported my first HD video from the camcorder today. looks like video editing could become quite complicated if i let it. for now, i think i’m ok with simple editing and my aspirations of using premiere or final cut pro may just be left as aspirations. iMovie is a whole lot less intimidating…

but the biggest issue i had was trying to figure out my photo processing workflow. let me tell you, this is critically important to me. i was really disappointed with what my options were.

what i really wanted was some way to browse my RAW photos, take the ones that i am interested into photoshop for processing and then save them out. i was really hoping that iphoto would be the tool for this. what i didn’t realize was that iphoto does not handle RAW files directly. instead, it imports the RAW photos and makes jpeg thumbnails. this is awful for me because then when i drag a photo from iphoto to photoshop, it drags the iphoto-processed jpg, not the RAW image.

if i am doing something wrong here, let me know, but this makes iphoto unusable for me. this sucks because i love, love, love the features that iphoto has to offer.

then i started looking at other options like aperture, but i just don’t get what all the hype around aperture is. it feels a little bloated to me and i’m not convinced that it really will improve my workflow.

coming from my windows workflow of using ACDSee as my image browser, i was desperate and googled “ACDSee mac” to see what other people were doing. well, guess what? ACDSee for mac is in beta and let me tell you it is fantastic. FANTASTIC. my workflow from windows can be directly moved over to the mac and all is well in the world again.