50gb xdcam discs capacity?
 

Hi there.
Using these discs on my PDW-700 shooting at the maximum res: 4:2:2 at 1980 x 1080- 50 mbps. However when I transfer a full disc in to the system it says the clip folder size is only 32gb or 27gb? Where is the remaining space? I thought the disc size limited you to 90 mins of HQ shooting or is there a maximum number of clips a disc can record? I appreciate space is kept for proxies etc, but to be almost 20gb short is a little surprising.

Hope all well

Sparky

Your computer may be misreading the folder size. How many minutes to get when filling up a 50GB disc with H 422 video? It should be around 100.

Thierry.

Thanks Thierry

The file sizes over the five x 50GB dics averages 32gb each, and this is accurate. I'm not sure how much footage each disc has recorded in length as was shooting over a week on and ENG shoot, but each time I used each disc until the camera told me the disc was full. Some clips may be 10 seconds to a minute in length. Is there a maximum number of clips you can record on a single disc, ie 250?

Cheers

Mark

Don't forget the Proxies and MetaData take up space on the disc and 500Gb (Maybe 1Gb on a 50Gb disc) is reserved for the general folder. A formatted 50Gb disc has about 46Gb total capacity.

There is a maximum number of clips on a disc but I can't remember how many.

The maximum number of clips is 300 for both sizes of discs. It sounds to me like you probably hit that mark and that's why the disc said it was full. You can configure the camera so it will give you a count-down in the viewfinder so you always know how many clips are left before you're out of ammo.

That's one reason I don't use 50GB discs very often. If your average clip length is shorter than 20 seconds, you'll be wasting money.

FYI, even if you have reached the 300 clip limit, you can still use whatever storage capacity is left on the disc for other types of files in the General and User Data directories.

Well thought, I did not think about these....

T.

Thanks Doug, I thought that was the case. You're right in this case (filming highlights of a golf tournament, where the average clip length is 20 seconds) ) I would have been much better off using the smaller 23gb discs. I guess when you are filming conferences etc, where you know the clip length will be longer, then that's the time to use the 50gb discs.
Your help is much appreciated. Sparky

Hi Mark,
I'm glad to have helped solve the mystery.

It's Just one of the hundreds of things covered in my new 320 page PDW-700/F800 Field Guide coming out later this month. Vortex Media's XDCAM Field Guides