How much space do I really need?
 

I have about 20 HDV tapes of footage for a documentary....some are the full hour, other are maybe 20 mins here and there, probably have a total of 15 hours? I feel like there is a lot of fluff on there that I'll never really use.

I'm going to be using a MacBook pro and FCE, but I want to get an external HD to export/store the footage. Would you recommend getting something like a 1TB drive and just dumping everything on there? or should i get like a 500 GB drive and just go through what i think I'll really use and export as I see appropriate? Is that a waste of time?

I've read that the Apple codec will make about an hour of HDV tape to about 30-50 GB per hour? Is that right? At 15 hours, I need almost 800 GB right there. Do I need extra storage for the project itself? Newbie at this...Any advice is welcome. Even if you can point me to a reasonably price external HD.
thanks!

yes, but two 500GB drives are probably more reliable

I think so, but that's my opinion

No. 1hr of HDV is ~10GB

Go with an internal drive with an enclosure.

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more info...http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=77329

JS

I think Mike is referring to the Apple Intermediate Codec which in fact takes 30-40 GB/h HDV.

And yes, I agree with John, I'd go with 500GB drives also. Seems to be the sweet spot right now - they're selling the bare drives for about $95-105 right now. There's also the option of buying an external enclosure with removable drive trays (a lot more expensive though - particularly if you need a firewire interface).
Best,
Dino

500 Gb Hd
 

can someone recommend a decent internal drive/enclosure combo? i would definitely need firewire, do i want 7200 RPM, 16MB Cache? whatever that means...

I recently saw WD (FW, USB, eSATA) drives for $140 (500GB) and $270 (1TB) at Costco. I have been using a 500GB WD for more than a year and had no problems.

Final Cut Pro can edit HDV, so you don't need as much storage space. But since Mike is using Final Cut Express, I think he is forced to convert to AIC for editing. As far as I can tell, even the latest version of Final Cut Express still doesn't handle HDV natively. So you need to figure on the 30-40 GB/hr number mentioned by Dino.

-Terence

is there a link that explains why the AIC codec converts the mpeg2 hdv to such a large file? i don't understand!

I've been very very happy buying from owc. Here's two options they sell:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...eptune-drives/

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-...te-al-pro-quad

I have one of the quad interface enclosures and I'm very happy with it. I'm getting up to 65 MB/sec via firewire 800 when copying large files to/from my G5.
Be aware that you can buy these enclosures bare (without drives - see bottom of page). When you then buy the drives seperately, you usually get the better waranties on the drive (e.g. 5 years on some Hitachi and Seagate).

Dino

The simple explanation is that Apple Intermediate Codec is a codec which is better for editing and effects as it's lessed compressed, and hdv is smaller but requires higher render times and will suffer more degradation during effects work/transitions, as it's more compressed.

The amount of storage you really require is ultimately down to what format you want to finish on.

Thanks Craig. Can you elaborate on this or point me in the right direction?
I'm not really sure what format i want to 'finish' on. I would imagine i would want to be able to store it in an HD format to burn to disc when it's more...but for the time being i guess SD to burn? I'm kinda confused about having a finished product.
When it's sitting on my hard drive and it's edited, do i then say, 'burn as 1080i60 or whatever?' i've never gotten to that point.

It also might make sense to make an estimate of
how much rendering you will be doing for color correction
and filters etc. That can wind up eating up drive space too.
I'm currently editing a documentary with about 30 hours (and
growing), and it's a good idea to have alot of headroom on
your drives...

Best of luck with it,

David

David, how much space do you currently have?

Haven't done a lengthy documentary in HDV, only smaller shoots in HDV and DVCPRO HD (and one where I was looking at cutting in uncompressed HD, but the file sizes and required HDD throughput speeds were just too big for my setup.)

What you finish on however, is something I can advise on. Finishing is something that you need to prepare for early on, preferably before production begins if possible.

If your goal is to get into some film festivals, with the potential for a sale later on down the track, then you should ideally be looking for at least a digibeta master (as far as I know still the most recognized international mastering format for SD footage, and what most middle sized/professional film festivals still opt for in the SD world - though this is changing rapidly with the growth of HD).

An Digibeta master in SD basically makes you ready for broadcast at most commercial non HD television stations, which from an international perspective for a documentary is your major market.

If you have and HD master, you are retaining more resolution information (but not necessarily more colour depth) which is helpful, but not hugely advantageous over an SD master for a documentary UNLESS you've managed to secure a sale to a specifically HD network (which is unlikely if you are shooting on HDV, because they HD channels are still limiting the amount of HDV content they allow to be included when labelling something HD, as their primary concern is high image quality as that's the difference the end subscribers are paying for, and will remain to be until HD broadcast is standard across all channels.)