video footage and file size.

derrick lenz · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 12:08 pm Post subject: video footage and file size.

alright i'm going to be putting quite a bit of footage on my comp pretty soon and i was wondering how much space does say one hour of raw footage take up. and will i notice a difference in my comps speed after doing so.

derrick lenz · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 12:16 pm Post subject:

oh yeah and is it expensive to add hard drive (like 20 giga bytes) and upgrade to a faster processor (like 1.8 to 2.2).

Zach M · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 12:45 pm Post subject:

20 minutes of raw footage usually takes up about 4 gigs. an hour will be about 12. Adding hard drives isn't extremely expensive, but if you're going to add, I'd recommend going high. You can get a 60 gig harddrive for almost the same as an 80, so I'd go with the 80.

derrick lenz · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 1:45 pm Post subject:

well i have a 60 gig hard drive and that's good for now but i'm kinda worried about filling up my comp.

bluefish86 · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 2:41 pm Post subject:

Filling up your hard drive shouldnt slow down your computer at all. The space it takes up depends on the format. I know DV video takes up 250 megs a minute, so if you plan on keeping it for a long time, you should probably compress it.

BillJ · Posted: Mar 04, 2003 10:58 pm Post subject:

Don't forget that you need to have the space for the raw footage (as someone else already mentioned, 12Gb per hour) plus room to save the edited video. So if you plan to work with an hour of raw footage you should expect to use at least 15 - 20 Gbs for the project.

You can pick up a new disk drive for $39 for a 40Gb, or an 80Gb drive for under a hundred if you shop around and watch for rebates. You need to make sure that the drive is fast enough to support video editing (most new drives are). A large buffer on the drive helps improve performance. I have 2 120Gb drives with 8MB buffer memory.

A 2nd drive can actually help improve performance of your PC if you keep your video editing software on one drive (usually the boot drive) and the video on the other. New processors are fairly inexpensive but you won't see much performance increase going from 1.8 to 2.2. Adding more RAM will probably make more of a difference. 512MB is a good start for video editing, 1GB is better.

derrick lenz · Posted: Mar 05, 2003 2:08 pm Post subject:

if i were to add say another 80 GB hard drive to my comp how would i distinguish between the two? how sould i just save video to one hard drive? also i'm not to clear on a buffer what exactly dose that do? thanks.

BillJ · Posted: Mar 05, 2003 5:31 pm Post subject:

In Premiere you can specify the location of different files. So now you would have maybe a C: and D: drive and you create a directory on the D: drive (your new 80GB drive) called Video. Then go into Premiere and under preferences you change the location of video files to be d:\video - it's that easy.

The buffer memory is used by the drive when reading and writing, and just improves performance. Cheaper drives will have a small buffer like 1MB but the more you have the better the performance for applications like video editing. Here's an example of one: http://www.westerndigital.com/products/products.asp?DriveID=32

CompUSA currently has a Maxtor brand 80GB drive for $69.99 after the $60 rebate = http://www.compusa.com/ item code is 301730.