Capacity of SDHC cards

P

PatrickMcVideo

Member
This is my first post here. It's a pleasure and honor to join you folks. I've been reading this forum for a while now since I've been in the market for a new camcorder. I've decided upon the HMC150 since it seems like the most "sure thing" in terms of being confident in my purchase. (The runner-up was the JVC HM100, but the only thing it beat the HMC150 on was that it worked natively with my FCP software.)

I added the HMC150 to my shopping cart, but as far as recording media goes, I initially added two 16 GB cards -- but then I thought wait a sec -- I have no idea how much recording time that will give me.

So this morning I have spent about 45 minutes searching this forum and other websites to find an answer. No luck.

Can anyone tell me, or is there a chart somewhere, that says for instance, how many minutes you can record on a 16 GB card at 1080p and at 720p, etc.?

Thanks!
 
Hey wow, talk about an honor -- I get a response from Barry Green! (Sorry, did I make your head too big now to fit in your edit suite?)

Thanks for the answer.
 
As a really quick rule of thumb, I always just assume 10 GB = 1 hour. This gives a wee bit of headroom in selecting a card for a particular application.

- Greg
 
Thanks for the info, Greg. It seems to jive with what Barry said too. It seems weird though, coming from the MiniDV world where the rule of thumb was one hour of taped footage equals 13 GB of drive space. I thought HD footage would take up much more space than SD footage. Oh wait I just thought of something -- maybe the hour of footage on the AVCHD camera only takes up 10 GB on the card, but once you convert it to ProRes to edit in FCP it grows exponentially in file size.

I wonder what the answer for that is then ... an hour of AVCHD footage is 10 GB, but once "logged and transferred" to ProRes, you get a file size of what?

Is it twice as big, four times as big...???
10 GB x 2 = 20 GB?
10 GB x 4 = 40 GB???

Knowing this will help me plan how many external hard drives I'll need, so thanks for the info. I really appreciate it.
 
Yes, your footage will grow to 10x its size when converted to ProRes.  An hour will take up about 100GB.

Depends on the version of ProRes you convert it to, but I think the main one people use is about 220mb/s, whereas the native AVCHD footage is about 21mb/sec, so yeah, it'll grow to 10x its size.
 
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