HD For Indies

This works for any codec on any platform - so here's some platform agnostic advice, works for Final Cut, Adobe, Avid, any Linux codec, etc.

I included this in an offhand fashion when I wrote about VideoSpace the other day, but I thought it'd be nice to break it out as it's own thing:

MB/sec * 3.6 = GB/hr

What's that mean? If you multiply the megabytes per second of a given datarate by 3.6, you get gigabytes per hour. MB/sec is handy for figuring out how fast your storage needs to be (add 25-35% for healthy QuickTime overhead room), and GB/hr is handy to know how MUCH storage you need.

So how's this work?

Let's say you know DV is 3.5 MB/sec (megabytes/sec, which is different from megabits/sec by a factor of 8 - 8 bits to the byte).

So if you've shot 16 full one hour tapes, how much hard drive space are you going to need? Uhhhhhh....if you don't have VideoSpace handy, multiply 3.5 MB/sec * 3.6 (that is the magic conversion factor) to get 12.6 GB/hr. Then multiply that by the total amount of time (pretending our 16 tapes are full one hour apiece), so 12.6*16=201.6 GB. So a 250 GB* hard drive is plenty to hold all your captured footage. Just don't forget to allow more room for renders and such.

*(which formats to about 232 GB usable capacity, I know this because the magic conversion factor is .925, so 250*.925=231.25)

-mike

Labels: codec, NLE, tips