Bigger Harddrive!
 

I only film HD video, and once youve imported the video, made a few cuts, colour graded, fine tuned the sound, and added some motion graphics, youre left with a 170gb folder! This is one of my worst cases, but I just find my harddrive rapidly filling up.

Am I missing an obvious setting to reduce file sizes?!? Or do you all just clear your drives regularly?

I have two 4TB external drives for use in production. I have another 2TB internal. Once I am done with a project, it gets archived, and comes off the drive. Intermediates are deleted 30 days after the project is delivered.

If a couple hundred GB are filling up your drive, you are not setting yourself up well for doing HD work. I have a 500GB drive just to port things around on. That's $120.

Go get yourself some drive space. I'd suggest a minimum of 2TB. And then get your workflow in order.

Mac connection has lacie quad interface 2tb drives for $160. Just got four. What I do to relieve some of the strain is when a project is delivered, I dump the large prores files and keep the compressed versions that came from the camera. I've had to revisit a couple of projects since deciding this and all I had to do was L&T back to prores and the project opens right up. Similar to the old days of recapturing tape.

My four new drives aren't an endgame solution though either. What I am working towards is clearing off my 4tb raid capable drive so I can use it as a mirrored 2tb raid. Cool thing is it uses 2-2tb drives and they are hot swappable and auto detect drive issues so you know before one side fails. Once I fill the drive, I can pull the pair and put them in a safe. Then insert a new pair of drives and start all over. Of course once I hit the lottery, I'll invest in a large raid system that can hold 24 2tb drives and runs on fiber to my computer!

Are you capturing uncompressed, or in some compressed codec. How long is your project, and what is your shooting ratio? I frequently work on 30 second commercials, and an average project is 300-500GB, (our exports are uncompressed, but our footage is compressed) with a series of spots easily taking over a TB of disk space. I have easily 100TB of archives on external drives, from projects that are now completed. High def video takes a lot of storage space. Luckily storage space is cheap now days. ($150 for a 2TB USB3 drive)

Thanks for the advice. Looking at external drives now to resolve this issue of mine.