a query re: enough hard drive space for video work

[hankduck]

I've seen a number of different estimates on how much hard drive space is needed for capturing/editing/burning DV. My experiences to date are much different.

My 120 G. dedicated external video hard drive contains the following: captured avi's with which I have made three 1 hour long and one 20 minute long DVD's. The avi's take up 30.3 G.s of space (the actual DVD files are no longer there). The avi's were captured from analog video at maximal quality. The drive also holds one project ready for burning occupying approx. 89 MB's.

Free space on the drive is 78.47 G.

I do direct burns to DVD.

Given that I would like to capture an entire 1 hour analog video of my wife's family and burn it to a DVD, I am wavering between figures of 240 MB of required hard drive space per minute of video up to 4 G. of storage space per minute of video. The second figure was given by Adobe in the Premiere manual. The first case would require 14+ G.s, the second 240 G.

My quandary: to buy another bigger drive or not.

[northcat_8]

1 hour of DV-AVI video is approximately 12 GB of space on your HD.

The space can be misleading because when you encode and author the application utilizes a TEMP directory, which will fluxuate in size.

I personally do not think a 120 GB drive is big enough, but I have 3 HDs 60, 120, 160 GBs. I also typically work on video where I have better than 80 GB of captured video all going into one DVD. I have to edit all those clips, and encode the Final AVI before I convert it to MPEG-2 and author it.

So depending on what you are doing...you may need more or less space.

[hankduck]

Thanks for your input. I suppose some of the recommended figures are inflated.

I have a couple of other drives lying around that I can use for storeage. If I pretty much empty my 120 G. dedicated video drive by storing all my avi's on other drive(s), I'll be working with 120 G. of space.

That should do it.

[northcat_8]

Hopefully you external HD is USB 2.0...otherwise I/O could be an issue.

[hankduck]

I have one of each, USB 2.0 and firewire. I thought firewire was preferable because it's faster transferring data than USB 2.0?