I'm So Confused.
- Thread starter rook
- Start date
oneinfiniteloop
Veteran
Bigger and faster will always help. SATA, SATA II, FW800, RAID, and Fibre are a few solutions that come to mind.
Luis Caffesse
Admin
It all depends what kind of "HD" footage you're talking about - and what you want to do with it.
If you want to store footage on a drive for archiving, then it doesn't really matter.
If you need to be able to play it back in realtime - then it all depends what codec you're talking about.
DVCProHD for example can be used in realtime off pretty much any single SATA drive.
The datarate is only 100mb/s at the most, so it's not a problem for most drives to handle.
But once you get into HDCam and higher datarate HD formats then you get into having to use a RAID to play back footage in realtime.
What you need to do is look at the datarate of the format/codec you'll be using, and get a hard drive that has a minimum sustained datarate greater than the datarate of that format.
(i.e. any drive with a minimum sustained datarate greater than 100mb/s should be able to handle DVCProHD footage without a problem).
Most hard drives specs are listed as MB/s (MegaBYTES per second).
Most formats datarates are listed as mb/s (MegaBITS per second).
8 bits = 1 Byte
But as someone already pointed out you should also consider the drives interface.
SATA, FireWire, etc all have their own limitations on datarate - so even if you RAID a bunch of drives together, if they're hooked up to your system via FireWire you're going to be limited by the minimum sustained datarate that FireWire can handle.
Wow.
I really made this all sound much more complicated than it really is.
If you want to store footage on a drive for archiving, then it doesn't really matter.
If you need to be able to play it back in realtime - then it all depends what codec you're talking about.
DVCProHD for example can be used in realtime off pretty much any single SATA drive.
The datarate is only 100mb/s at the most, so it's not a problem for most drives to handle.
But once you get into HDCam and higher datarate HD formats then you get into having to use a RAID to play back footage in realtime.
What you need to do is look at the datarate of the format/codec you'll be using, and get a hard drive that has a minimum sustained datarate greater than the datarate of that format.
(i.e. any drive with a minimum sustained datarate greater than 100mb/s should be able to handle DVCProHD footage without a problem).
Most hard drives specs are listed as MB/s (MegaBYTES per second).
Most formats datarates are listed as mb/s (MegaBITS per second).
8 bits = 1 Byte
But as someone already pointed out you should also consider the drives interface.
SATA, FireWire, etc all have their own limitations on datarate - so even if you RAID a bunch of drives together, if they're hooked up to your system via FireWire you're going to be limited by the minimum sustained datarate that FireWire can handle.
Wow.
I really made this all sound much more complicated than it really is.
Last edited:
oneinfiniteloop
Veteran
Thank god you answered my lighting question in more simpler terms! LOL
Barry_Green
Moderator
What kind of HD? HDV takes up the same (or less) space than DV does.
DVCPRO-HD takes up 2 to 4 times as much space as DV does, so bigger & faster is recommended, but I've run multiple streams of DVCPRO-HD off of the internal drive of a Mac G5 with no problems. Even so, a 500GB G-RAID drive is under $500 at B&H.
DVCPRO-HD takes up 2 to 4 times as much space as DV does, so bigger & faster is recommended, but I've run multiple streams of DVCPRO-HD off of the internal drive of a Mac G5 with no problems. Even so, a 500GB G-RAID drive is under $500 at B&H.