How does an economics professor calculate?
Do you really need 8 TB for this 3 hour project?
The Canon XF-300 outputs 50Mbps MPEG-2 HD material. This means 22.5 billion Bytes/hour.
You'll probably convert it to ProRes 422 HQ for editing. This means another 99 billion Bytes/hour.
If you shoot
30 hours for your 3 hour project, you occupy 30*(22.5+99) billion Bytes with camera footage plus editable material. In the course of editing you might create 3 hours of necessary ProRes render files for an additional 3*99 billion Bytes. Thus 3.942 trillion Bytes of storage is enough for a 3 hour project constructed from 30 hours of footage. I prefer to store the camera footage and ProRes footage separately.
Do you have three free hard drive bays in your Mac Pro? If so, depending on your storage need, you can mount three 1TB or three 2 TB identical 7200 rpm hard drives in the Mac Pro and use OSX
with no RAID card to join them as RAID-0. I doubt that this will give you 440Mb/s but it will be plenty fast enough for HD editing in ProRes 422 HQ. For RAID-0 best use non-RAID-class drives. Sorry but you have not yet spent $500.
RAID-0 provides no data redundancy. To the contrary, if any of the three RAID-0 hard drives fail, then you must revert to a full backup kept on one or more external drives. Backup drives do not need to be fast. Generally original footage accretes during the production, and the ProRes converted footage accretes correspondingly. This makes manual backup trivial if you or an assistent have a bit of patience. Even with two independent backups, a good security against fire or theft, the whole storage need can be met for less than $1000.
The above describes how I work and how others who don't want to
even think about RAID boxes and their terrifying failures work. Professional video editors need hairier storage because they jump from project to project and require collaborative flexibility. What does an economics professor making an educational video need?
Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany