[Hidden-tech] Re: Video editing hard drive requirements

[Will Loving]

Hi Robert, I think your numbers are a little off. While a DVD with two hours
of video is about 4GB, when you are actually editing and producing the DVD
it is much, much more. Raw video is approximately 12Gb per hour.

When I work in iMovie to create two hour video I start with at least 24-25GB
of raw material, possibly much more depending on how much I want to edit
out. Adding titles, edits, transitions and additional sound tracks may add
several addition Gb.

Once I'm done, I send that movie to iDVD. The iDVD file takes up little
space UNTIL you encode/render the contents to DVD format video. At that
point, the iDVD file swells to include the full contents of the encoded
video, so for a single layer DVD it adds 4.3GB. I then save that to a DVD
disk image file which adds another 4.3GB to my hard drive.

So for a hypothetical, simple, two hour movie project of a school event with
minor editing, you need a working space of:

Raw video: 25GB
Edits to video: 5GB
iDVD encoded video: 4.3GB
DVD disk image: 4.3Gb

Total: 39-40GB

Once you're done creating the video, you can delete iDVD's encoded contents
as well as the iMovie file, leaving just the image file. And, you can even
delete the image file if you burned a few copies so you have a backup, but
while you're working, you need to allow lots of space. If you are doing
several projects at once or storing video for upcoming projects which I
often do, disk space can also quickly evaporate. This is especially true if
you are working with a lot of raw material that will be edited down.

The Mac Mini is an excellent machine and Apple's software lets anyone learn
how to edit video, but anyone (Mac or Win user) who is doing any degree of
video editing, will need an extra internal or external hard drive (or three)
for storing raw video on.

Will

Will Loving, President
Dedication Technologies, Inc.



on 1/19/07 1:57 PM, Robert Heller at heller at deepsoft.com wrote:

> But this is a *somewhat* special purpose activity.  If *I* were doing
> video editing, I'd probably have a separate disk just for that purpose.
> Note: a DVD (holding maybe 3 hours of video) only holds 4.5g, so 300g
> is like 66 DVDs worth of video, or about 198 hours of video.
> 
> If one is only doing 'office' stuff (word-processing, spread-sheets, web
> surfing, E-Mail, and the like), 300g is an *enormous* amount of disk space.


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