how the heck was video editing done on machines with tiny hard drives?

Guys im wondering, how the heck was video editing done on those old macs running os7.5, or those irix machines with tiny 4gb hard drives...?

Reason i wonder is, my teacher gave me her old G3 mac with a 10gig hard drive, and she had premeire pro on there (mac os9 version) and she told me her husband used to edit and render all kindsa stuff on there...how???? he used to use like a cannon GL2...i took the firewire card out and put it in m dually..i have my dually, with a 120gb drive souly for video getting 13gb/1hr...how the heck was it done on these old computers? i saw some of the stuff too it was pretty impressive. She had on there a TON of programs too, photoshop 6/7, after effects 5.5, dreamweaver, the entire flash studio...all on this tiny 10gig!

I ask because shes giving me this G3 lappy (wallstreet) im gonna upgrade the hell out of it, and i guess she did some video and stuff on there too...itd be nice to do video on the road..i know i coulndt run combustion or anything on it, but simple edits/renders of clilps i can takle on my dually would rule.

thanks in advance

Maybe they didn't edit raw dv footage with them.

Or they stored it on large disk arrays over the the network.

well in FCP you can edit an entire film wihtout it ever leaving your camera....how that works is beyond me, its slow as hell, but it sounds awsome.

Well, there were music videos 25 years ago and back then hard drives were too expensive for most everyone. I remember spending $1,000++ on one that, if memory serves, was only 10 MB.

Back then, hard drives were not even used for storing intermediate material as you worked. Of course video tape resolution was something like 480x640 and used 3 bit RGB. So editing was done with tape as the storage medium and the effects came from a box that you could connect to an Amiga PC called the video toaster.

The Amiga was a computer that was unlike what we know today (duh) with an OS that was specific to the hardware. The V/T was a box that coould only be plugged into an Amiga. I believe that it did it's magic on streaming data something like:

tape deck>Amiga>Video Toaster>tape deck

I checked google for you and there seems to be plenty of support for the technology today (at least for linux). Take a look for yourself. Even if that is not exactly waht you are looking for, perhaps you will find new stuff to play with.

MW

cool....

that is pretty cool..there is a video toast today, its usually some insane dual xeon machine