I’ve often wondered just how much better an SSD is for multicam editing than an HDD (spinning hard disk drive). Recently, as part of detailed review of the OWC Thunderbay 4 HDD RAID, I decided to find out.
The short answer: SSDs blow the doors off HDDs for multicam editing, regardless of which NLE you use for multicam editing.
As this chart illustrates, while each NLE handles multicam editing differently, in all cases the SSD is faster. Much, much faster!
The bars indicate the maximum number of multicam streams (camera angles) that can be edited in each NLE without dropping frames.
The limiting factor is not read or write speeds, but latency. That’s the time it takes for the hard drive heads to move from one file to the other. SSDs have no latency, HDDs have a lot. When an HDD plays only one file there’s plenty of time for the heads to move around the disk. But when more than one file is playing, the heads start spending more time traveling around the drive than they do playing files.
When the latency grows large enough, the drive starts dropping frames.
NOTE: For the technically astute, I’m combining seek time with latency to make the concept of “time needed to move the heads to a new position” easier to understand.
What’s important to know about latency is that file size (or frame size / frame rate) is not important. What IS important is the number of files playing at the same time. So these limits are essentially the same for any frame size or frame rate video – proxies or SD or HD or 4K.
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