Easy question...
 

What kind of drives are necessary to cut HDV? Do regular SATA 150 7200 rpm drives work well? Is a RAID0 configuration necessary? What about for HD captured over SDI?

I guess what I'm really asking is what are the data rates per second for the different types of HD media.

Eddie

HDV datarate is similar or lower than DV, so non-RAID ATA or SATA 7200rpm is fine for basic editing.

If you want multiple RT streams, or HD, then you'll need more capable setups.

There's a datarate table with some HD rates halfway down page 1 of this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...infamoustable3

Drive speed requirement really depend on the HDV/HD solution you are going to be using. Native HDV only requires a 3+MB/s per stream, so drive upgrades are not required, but CPU upgrades are as native HDV is very taxing (i.e. slow.) Then you mentioned HD over SDI, that is the opposite extreme, CPU hardly does anything yet the drives need to sustain up to 150MB/s per stream -- that requires a complex disk system (about 8 drives in a RAID 5+0 is a common setup) and a PCI-X bus.

Where are solutions inbetween these two extremes by using a compressed intermediate which reduces the CPU requirements of native HDV with a moderate increase in bit-rate (normally between 10-15MB/s for 1080i HDV.) Apple has this solution for HDV and Canopus and CineForm for HDV and HD (SDI) sources.

Interesting link. I was surprised to find out that HDV is so compressed. I'm assuming quality doesn't suffer much?

Thanks!

Eddie

>> I'm assuming quality doesn't suffer much?

Depends who you ask: opinions vary from "it's fantastic" to "it really sucks" depending on whether you are consumer, prosumer, broadcaster etc.

There are various threads here on the quality issue - for example several discuss whether or not commercial HD broadcasters will accept HDV footage (often they say they won't, but footage is creeping onto some shows nevertheless).