Would anyone check iSight->iMovie disk usage for me?

[jsw]

Sorrry to ask, but I'm at work now and don't have a Mac or an iSight available.

I've been asked to record an 8 hour meeting tomorrow (joy of joys) and am considering bringing in my Mac and iSight to do it with. I'm curious if anyone has any idea what kind of disk space I'll need if I use the iSight to import into iMovie. I think the iSight quality will be sufficient, but I'm not sure the transfer rate would be.

I could hook up a camcorder, but I absolutely do not want/need 14GB/hour quality.

If anyone has a minute, would you please record a short iSight video via iMovie ('04 or '05) and let me know how much space it took and how long it was? I'd appreciate it!

I tried seaching for this, but wasn't able to find anything specific.

 

[munkle]

Afraid I was lazy and could only be bothered to record myself making silly faces for a minute - came to 208 MB (using iMovie '04).

 

[Applespider]

From Apple Support Site

You can record up to 9.5 minutes of video at a time, as long as you have enough disk space (a 9 minute clip takes about 3 gigabytes of disk space).

 

[munkle]

Looks like camcorder, then compressing movie afterwards is the way to go!

 

[wordmunger]

Just recorded a 1-minute movie: 200 MB, or about 20 GB/hour.

Also, when I stopped recording, it took 2 minutes to convert it to DV on my 1.3 ghz ibook. So it would take about 16 hours to convert an 8-hour movie. I don't know what the memory/HD constraints of the converting process might be, but it sounds like this is probably not a good idea, even if you have 160 GB of HD space to spare.

Edit: Munkle, maybe we should get together and compare silly-face videos sometime

 

[jsw]

Thanks, all! I had thought the iSight would allow for longer recording times given a set amount of disk space. Guess not!

 

[munkle]

Edit: Munkle, maybe we should get together and compare silly-face videos sometime

Bet my monkey faces are better than your monkey faces (the extra 8MB clearly show that I've put in more effort!)!