How much disc space for AVCHD?
 

What's up everyone! Can someone give me an approximate figure of how much hard drive space is needed for let's says a 2 hour recording time on a Hi-Def (AVCHD) camera? I'm building a new PC and would like to get some idea on hard drive space needed.

Thanks in advance.

It depends on the data rate chosen but assume 7G an hour at high data rate.
Ron Evans

space taken = data rate per time unit * number of time units

If you will be working on more than one project at any given time, you'll want to consider an even bigger HD. Maybe a few of the power users can post their computer specs? I'm new to editing myself and would love to see what others are using as far as PC's and MAC specs. Also, anyone using a RAID 0 set-up?

Well for Panasonic’s AVCHD camcorders they claim around 40 minutes for a 4 gig card so it’s basically around 12 gigs for 2 hours. Since Sony and Canon uses a higher bit, you would need a little bit more storage for the same amount of time. The average bit rate for the Sanyo is 12Mbps, Panasonic is 13Mbps, for Sony it’s around 15 to 15.5Mbps and for Canon It’s around 15.6 to 15.9Mbps.

My current system is AMD 4200X2, 2G RAM, 160G boot drive, 160G for temp files, three 250G storage drives. Two external 500G drives in eSATA Antec boxes. No RAID I don't feel the complications and issues are worth it for DV, HDV or AVCHD editing as the bottleneck is the CPU performance not drive throughtput. I prefer to dedicate different tasks to different drives so that their load is low at any given time and there is no conflict in seek operations for multiple data requests. Software, Premiere CS3, Vegas 8 and Edius 4.54, DVDLab PRO2, TMPGenc 4, Sound Forge9, Nero 6, Photo Brush, Womble and Ulead Movie Factory. Of the more sophisticated NLE's that I have, Vegas 8 is the only really useable NLE for AVCHD at the moment though Edius will edit slowly and can convert to Canopus HQ for fast editing but takes a long time to convert. Cameras- FX1, SR7, HC96, TRV50 and PC10. IN good light the SR7 picture is comparable to the FX1 but as expected has more problems when the light gets low compared to the FX1. For the casual user shooting family events a hard drive based camera is very convenient. The Sony Browser software does a reasonable job of archiving the data in a convenient calendar or file view etc and makes backups to disc easy too. I feel by next year the NLE's will have sorted out the issues with dealing with AVCHD. When HDV came out none of the NLE's could edit the RAW files now most can deal just fine. Vegas 8 and EDius 4.5 seem to edit HDV at about the same perceived speed as DV!!!!!

Ron Evans