Storage Requirement for Feature Film (Telecine)
 

Hey Guys,

I will be working some in the post production of a feature film shot on 35mm. Can anyone give me an approximate amount of storage that I should plan on having available for the edit? We are going to edit on FCP. I am new to both feature length and film and am trying to get up to speed.

Thanks.
Jonathan

If you do an offline edit in FCP, then the storage requirements are very minimal. You would likely get your material dubbed onto miniDV tapes with timecode. miniDV is simply 13GB/hour.

Once you have your picture locked, you go into online editing. Re-capture the material from the masters at full quality. You wouldn't have to worry about storage here, because you only need to capture ~2 hours (only the stuff that goes into the final product).

If you want to work with film scans, then that does have storage requirements. Your post indicates telecine however.

2- If you want to do the online editing yourself, then you do need to watch storage requirements. This will depend on what format you want to master on, and what format you transfer your film to.

Ah, I see.

I will check with the editor as far as online vs. offline. I am betting an offline edit from the information I have received thus far.

thanks:)

Don't forget to log everything into Cinema Tools or you will have major problems for the online edit.

Be careful here. If you are cutting negative, DV tape via firewire is fine. If you are going to online, make sure you digitize from a deck that is controlled by an RS422 connection. Unfortunately firewire TC is notoriously (slightly) unreliable. Enough though to really mess up an online.

If you are shooting 90-100 days or so you will probably need 800 - 1000 Gb of space (depending on number of cameras and printed takes).