How much hard drive do I need to capture 5 hours of raw footage?
 

I have 5 hours of raw footage I need to edit. How much drive space do I need? Do I need a separate external drive? I'm thinking of buying the new imac (because of price) and I wanted to know what's the best way of capturing my footage and working with it.

Thank you.

Gilbert

Hi Gilbert,

I just looked at my files and they range from 12,2 to 13,2 GB per 60 minute tape (miniDV). The difference comes first, from the actual length of the tape as most of them actually run around 62 minutes and second, how close to the end of the tape I filmed.

As for harddisk space: No matter how many Gigabyte, Terabyte or Exabyte you have, you will NEVER EVER have enough of it. :-)

Cheers, Peter

A commonly available 80 GB drive will hold 6 hours of DV. Make sure it's an IDE drive that spins at least at 5400rpm. It doesn't have to be an external drive, but it should be used for nothing else but DV... no programs, operating system, etc... just video storage.

Gilbert,

For every 5 minutes of footage it would take roughly 1gig of hard disk space, and so for 5 hours worth of footage you need something pretty big probably a 60 or 80 gig disk would do the job.

I suggest that you use this drive only for video footage and nothing else due to the amount of space one might need.

You don't really need an external hard drive, but with no experience with Macs I could be wrong, but you could probably get a way with internal ones. Your best bet would be for fire wire disks but these can cost quite a bit, or you could use an IDE 5400rpm standard hard drive much more cheaper.

All the best,

Ed Smith

I was going to mention the new offlineRT feature of Final Cut Pro 3.0, and the fact that you'd need less than 4 gigs space to edit 5 hours of footage

...but I don't want to start another PC/Mac war.

;)

Thanks
 

Thank you for the help!

Gilbert

This is an article on IDE RAID that might help.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/cgi-bin/getframeletter.cgi?/2002/01_jan/news/cw_avidds5ships.htm

Keep in mind here that you do not only need storage for
your raw material! You also need space for temporary
files, preview files (if you use Premiere at least) and space
for output files! If you output straight to DiVX or MPEG2 it
might not be much space. But if you are going to output
back to DV your going to need more space again.

I just bought myself a brandnew 60GB 7200 RPM Maxtor
drive... Very nice, very needed!

Good luck

5 hours * 13 Gig/Hour = 65 Gig

You will need a minimum of 65 Gig to hold 5 hours of footage. You will also need additional space for rendering and other associated pieces of overhead. I would recommend a minimum of 80 Gig.