How do you calculate the size requirement for video files? Suppose I shoot at 1920 x 1080 (1080P). What will be the size of this uncompressed HD video (say, 1 hr long)? I am trying to make sure that a 750 GB size HDD will be good enough for (only) data storage. Actual video files will be 10-15 hrs total.
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What size HDD?
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darthraige
macrumors 68000
Depends. What are you shooting on? What camera? Are you sure it's going to be uncompressed HD? If so, you'll need Terabytes, not Gigabytes. We shoot on Sony's XDCAM and that uses MPEG2 compressed HD and the file sizes are awesome. Just a lil bit bigger than SD file sizes. Extremely better quality too!
The camera is going to be Sony EX1 most likely. The editor - FCP or Adobe Pro. I'll have a seperate HDD for the scratch files (don't know how big that one should be). The HDD's will have a RAID 0 with sufficient external backups.
student_trap
macrumors 68000
im interested in this too, especially how large a drive for scratch should be? At the mo im looking to order my mac pro with 2 TB of space, the first for the os and general files, and the other for video files and then im looking to get a 3rd hd for scratch, although as i have said i dont know how large a drive i should get?
bigbossbmb
macrumors 68000
It won't be uncompressed. You should leave it in the format that it is shot in. The format that the EX1 shoots in takes about 19Gb/hour. Remember that you may want to set FCP to render in ProRes422 which will be larger files, but closer to lossless.
As for scratch disks, if that is where you are going to put all of your render and temp files, it would be helpful if it was very large too. Renders are big files too.
Looking at Apple's White Paper on ProRes422 http://www.digitalpictures.com/images/ProRes_422_WhitePaper.pdf, the 1920x1080 at 24P with a bit rate of 176 MBps, the file size is 1.32GB/minute. That's about 80 GB / hr. Am I to assume that this determines the size of the final output, that is, the edited 90-minute movie? And the scratch files? The original video files to be about 19GB / hr.