Huge Files
 

When I am using cineform (trial copy) I put the settings on Best, these files are HUGE! How do you guys back up these huge files or dont you, cause you can go through hard drives fast. Just filmed a wedding, we have 6 tapes to download, this will take up like 360gb. what do you guys suggest?

Hi Andy, I also do weddings, wow 6 tapes! what all do you film? I thnk somewhere in this thread Dave said medium works just fine! Also if you are going to work with CF you will need losts of storage or only work on say the Ceremony first then the reception if you can.

My video is stored on a 5TB capacity RAID array (actually 7 x 1TB in RAID3 with Hot Spare). While that's obviously overkill, a 1TB single drive is cheap and easy to install if you have a spare internal bay. If you don't have room inside the case for one (or two, or three) more drive(s), you could get an eSATA card and an external 2TB eSATA drive for probably under $300 total.

We shoot four-camera shows and end up with up to 12 tapes per performance, and we usually shoot and capture two performances for safety. So at 60GB per hour you can see it adds up.

I asked David this question recently regarding AVCHD:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-...y-setting.html

High is what I use and it looks great.

Simon

Andy
Two 1 TB drives as RAID 0 is around $600 or less & you are home free.
I found that it was much better to just fork out for the storage and not have to think about it anymore

Thanks for the info guys! Why are M2T files so hard to work with? just curious.

M2T files are MPEG files that are I-frame based. Only the I-frames are complete frames. Usually the I-frames occur once every 16 frames (NTSC). In order to preview or render the M2T file on the timeline, the NLE has to recalculate each frame based on each I-frame and the respective P and B frames so that each frame is complete. This process is very processor intensive. (Read - SLOW)

interesting, thank you very much!

In business, I feel you should "put a number on it"

So currently figure about 10 cents a gb U.S.
$100 at most for a 1 TB drive. $300 for a 2 TB drives (15 cents a gigabyte I think).
I use 1TB drives for archival, but I'm file based so I don't have tapes for safety.
With available 2TB drives, online storage isn't too bad. A bigger question may be what you are going to deliver, and after you get paid, what data are you going to keep? If you have the processing power, it's pretty easy to figure out the total cost of handling big files. If you archive on hard disk, there are inexpensive devices that look like toasters that allow easy addition and removal of disk drives.
I archive to inexpensive 1TB samsung drives that can be purchased for $80-90 dollars. The cost of data storage isn't too bad any more. But it should be figured into the cost of providing hi def.