HDCAM Hard Drive Space

GaryinCalifornia

GaryinCalifornia

Veteran
Anyone have a clue how much space is taken up on a hard drive for footage shot on a Cine Alta...

For example a gig a minute... on average...
 
... but that's irrelevant because you can't capture that footage. Sony never made the codec available. So you're going to instead have to capture through an HD-SDI board, into whatever codec you choose. If you're on a Mac you might be bringing the footage in through a Kona card into DVCPRO-HD, for example. Or you might choose some other codec. Whatever codec you select, will determine what the actual bitrate is.
 
Fair enough - I wouldn't go so far as to say it's irrelevant though, ideally you'd want to capture to a codec with an equal or higher bitrate.
Don't you stand to lose something by going from HDCam to DVCProHD seeing as it's about 2/3rds of the bitrate?
 
Perhaps irrelevant was the wrong word. Point was that you can't capture the footage in its native format.

Whether you lose something is arguable, because there's compression efficiency and color sampling to factor in as well; they're both DCT-compressed 8-bit codecs, so they're pretty similar. But the point is: you've got to capture to something you can edit on your system; DVCPRO-HD or CineForm or DNxHD or CanopusHQ or some other editing codec.
 
So lets say I capture through a kona or black magic to dvcpro-hd... then it would still be around 1 gig a minute...

I might be able to get a cine alta loan... so just trying to figure out how much hard drive space to purchase and a card...

Thanks for the answers...
 
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