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PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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CDS, CD-ROMS, AND DVDS
specifications before you buy a pack of one hundred incompatible discs! Depending on the type, a 12-centimeter single-sided DVD holds 4.7GB (the contents of seven CDs) and a double-sided version holds 9.4GB. Either way, that’s a huge amount of data.
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CHAPTER 6: DISPLAY AND DISTRIBUTION [ 223 ]
The deeper you venture into personal media, the more stor- age you are going to need. Right now you may have a sweet computer with what seems like endless gigabytes of space. But chances are you’ll eat this up in no time. Programs take up more space than you think. Any time-based media like video or audio can quickly fill a hard drive.
• Portable hard drives (also known as pocket drives).
A portable external hard drive will let you download pic- tures from your camera while you’re on the road as well as back up your photo collection. An external hard drive will not only allow you to move from one machine to another with all your needed files, but will allow you to back up your system, just in case. It’s a good idea to copy your project files once a day. At the very least, back up projects every time you reach a critical creative point and back up your whole system once a week. When you’re finished with a project, archive it on CD or DVD disks.
Portable hard drives require no AC connector; you just plug them into the Firewire port of your computer. They are very useful in transporting files between computers. The smallest you should buy is 80G.
Hard drives aren’t the only solution to storage, but they are the most convenient. Here are the different storage op- tions you will find in operation today:
• Flash drives (also known as thumb drives). Flash drives are portable, lightweight data storage devices. They connect via the USB interface. Their capacities are always expanding. Current ones hold between 1GB and 4 GB.
• ZIP drives. These are out-of-date storage systems built into older laptops. Will store 40MB to 750MB.
• CD (compact disc) stores digital data. It was introduced in the 1980s as a medium for playing back up to seventy-four minutes of recorded music.
printing onto a disc
• CD-ROM. (ROM stands for “read-only memory”) is a storage device that slips into computer drives and records data (CD-R) or is rewritable (CD-RW). These optical discs typically hold up to 700MB of data.
The little cluster of discs (top) shows a range of packag- ing choices (remember, “the package is the product”— or so an old advertising adage tells us). The custom box for a DVD (bottom) about Hurricane Katrina is a three-panel presentation that displays information about the disc. Discs from Michael Dougherty, Maria Bachmann (red), and Carolina Correa; disc set by the Creative Counsel, the Opportunity Agenda, and other not-for-profits.
Special printers will directly print onto a blank DVD or CD disc with the design and information appearing to be embed- ded in the plastic surface of the disc.
• DVD (digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is an optical storage device that has reached ascendancy as a simple, inexpensive, and stable platform for digital information of any kind. Variations such as DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, or HD DVD represent all the different ways that data is written onto the shiny plastic surface. Most modern DVD drives will read all formats, but not all formats can be written by all computer drives. Check your computer’s
The really high road is reached with one of the specialty printers shown here. A technology called Lightscribe uses a laser to burn low-resolution images into the face of the disc. It’s a clean, easy way to make good-looking discs.
• External hard drives. These are the best buy. They use an AC adaptor and are slightly bigger than portable versions. They connect to your computer by Firewire, which is traditionally used for video and USB, which is more commonly found on PCs.
The Epson Stylus RX595 (top) costs about $130. The Pixma iP430 is about $180.