Hard drive space needed for video

[*kjm]

I have a chance to get a free 9Gig SCSI hard drive to edit my Sony digital 8 tapes (120). Is that enough space to edit one video at a time? I have a bunch of tapes and just got Elements 7 but still need a drive. I'm already running some SCSI so I can just drop the drive in if it will be big enough. Thanks for your help.

 

[Fardringle]

The raw video from my Mini DV camera (1 hour tapes) is 40GB per tape. I'm not sure what it would be for a Digital 8 but it's probably more than 9GB. Regardless of the size, even relatively recent SATA hard drives will probably be faster than an old 9GB SCSI drive.

 

[*kjm]

Wow 40G! I take it the software has to compress it to fit onto the DVD then. I would have never thought the compression was that high. Maybe the 147GB SCSI is in order. What other SATA drives are fast enough to edit real time?

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
The raw video from my Mini DV camera (1 hour tapes) is 40GB per tape. I'm not sure what it would be for a Digital 8 but it's probably more than 9GB. Regardless of the size, even relatively recent SATA hard drives will probably be faster than an old 9GB SCSI drive.

1 hour of DV-AVI = ~13GB.

9GB is too small for a 1 hour project. You could get a 1/2 hr on it. But things to consider.

1 hr = 13GB. Any effects can generate a temp file with the same space requirements (1 1 hour effect applied to the whole video... figure 13GB - this would be like applying color correction to the entire video.)

DVD Temp = 5GB/hour. If you go to create a 1 hr DVD at DVD quality, it will create a temp M2V + PCM or AC3 file that will be over 4GB. Some editors will then create an ISO temp file, so add <5GB for that too. Total... look at 11GB temp space possible for creating DVDs.

And chances are that your 9GB SCSI is not really much faster in the short term. And definitely slower as the drive gets full. As the system starts trying to find free space on the 9GB drive, you will definitely get slower than some large SATA drive.

If the editor supports it, you could use that 9GB drive as temp space. It is small. But then again, when I did projects, they were usually between 60-400GB in size (one of the last big ones I did was 23 DV tapes in size).

 

[*kjm]

Thanks for the info...... Maybe I should be looking at two drives. One for capture and one for storing them. Last time I edited any video was about 8 to 10 years ago so All I remember from back then is you had to use SCSI to not drop frames and to be able to do other things on the computer while doing the capture.


What if I look into getting two 640GB drives.

Just an FYI to anyone helping me with this I will be useing Adobe Premiere® Elements 7 that I just bought.

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: Fardringle
The raw video from my Mini DV camera (1 hour tapes) is 40GB per tape. I'm not sure what it would be for a Digital 8 but it's probably more than 9GB. Regardless of the size, even relatively recent SATA hard drives will probably be faster than an old 9GB SCSI drive.

1 hour of DV-AVI = ~13GB.

Oops, you're right. When I looked at my "in progress" folder my fingers typed the total size of the folder (three 1 hour tape files) instead of the single file size of 13 GB. Either way, it's too big for a 9GB drive. Using that spare drive as a swap/temp location could work since it's hard to beat a price of free.


Those Western Digital drives will be faster than the 9 GB SCSI drive if your motherboard supports fast SATA drives, and they will give you a lot more space to work with.

 

[gsellis]

I do not use Adobe, but 2 640's is good. If you got really going with pro tools, 3 drives is recommended. 1 for OS and apps, 1 for store, 1 for workspace. But if not doing it full time, 2 640's is great. Know that if you do a lot of video (note that I mentioned 23 tapes for 1 project), think Terabytes, RAID 5..... 😀

 

[*kjm]

Originally posted by: gsellis
I do not use Adobe, but 2 640's is good. If you got really going with pro tools, 3 drives is recommended. 1 for OS and apps, 1 for store, 1 for workspace. But if not doing it full time, 2 640's is great. Know that if you do a lot of video (note that I mentioned 23 tapes for 1 project), think Terabytes, RAID 5..... 😀

I have a decent system now......
3.2 C2D
Gigabyte P35 MB
4gig ram
2 320Gig HD one for OS and one for storage
1 20gig SCSI HD
3870X2....... ect.

The two 640's would be for the video editing only. With what everyone is telling me it looks like this will be a good starting point. I could go with two of the 1T drives from WD but from what I have read the 640GB seems to be the fast/sweet spot now.