720p footage to Hard Drive

I plan to shoot a low budget feature on 720p, 24 frames, progressive, compressed. (Enough information, or neeed more?)

I figure with a 90-minute feature, and about a low 4-to-1 shooting ratio, I will end up with about 6-hours of camera footage.

1. If I transfer 6-hours of 720p footage to a single hard drive, how much space in gigabytes will it take up on the hard drive?

2. Is the data rate playback from a single hard drive fast enough to view 720p 24fps video?

Thanks --

Jack Lindauer

Google the "AJA Data Rate Calculator" and download it. It'll tell you this......

6 hours of 720p24 DVCProHD is 132.71 GB assuming 4-track audio.

Datarate is 5.76 MB/s. Basically any hard drive can handle that, but you should allow a sizeable overhead for comfortably editing multiple tracks of video.

NickScale

Mac Pro 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
OSX 10.6.4, FCP 7.0.2

>1. If I transfer 6-hours of 720p footage to a single hard drive, how much space in gigabytes will
>it take up on the hard drive?

Use this:
[www.digitalrebellion.com]

>2. Is the data rate playback from a single hard drive fast enough to view 720p 24fps video?

If you have the hard drive, run it through this:

[www.lafcpug.org]



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks for the info & calculator for 720p footage to disk.

Can camera captured 720p24 DVCProHD be played back for viewing through the FireWire 800 port, or would I need a SATA card inside the MacPro with an external SATA drive?

Jack Lindauer

By play back, do you mean running a video stream out through FW800 for monitoring? There are devices, such as the AJA IO HD, which do this. But for a Mac Pro I'd recommend an internal card such as Kona or Blackmagic.

If you mean simply playing the file off the hard disk in realtime, then any Firewire 400, 800, eSATA or even USB 2 would be adequate, but I stress you must allow overhead for playing multiple streams simultaneously. So as in all cases, go for the fastest you can afford.

You would need an eSATA (external SATA) card to plug in an eSATA drive, but many drives have FW800 which is fine for your purposes.

Also although eSATA is nominally faster than FW800 in terms of bus speed, you would really need to connect a RAID drive to see a substantial speed advantage.

I'd recommend reading around some more about media storage and the specific workflow you're planning, there are some great FAQs on this site.

Jack,

For Macs, this is a killer calculator Widget download (free):

[www.digital-heaven.co.uk]

OOOOOOr...Videospace also has an online calculator page formatted especially for iPhone!!!:

[www.videospaceonline.com]

Rock N Roll.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>If you mean simply playing the file off the hard disk in realtime, then any Firewire 400,
>800, eSATA or even USB 2 would be adequate

Not USB 2 though. They're a little cranky for editing which requires more sustained bandwidth, and that's also the last thing you'd want to use for capturing.

Data rate for DvcproHD 720 is 50mb/s, also approximately 7 MB/s with audio, but you need good sustained overheads.

What camera are you going to be shooting on is probabably more important.



www.strypesinpost.com