Setting Up a Mac Editing System

S

sloaneparker

Greetings, I am making my first film and working on a Mac computer system. Inspired by the amazing editing work of the film <em>Tarnation</em>, (depressing subject matter granted but really top notch editing), I realized that it is possible to make a quality film on a Mac computer.

My question: I am going to purchase another Mac computer as a hard drive/editing station for my film/s. How much hard drive space does a feature film require? Also, are there special monitor considerations I should keep in mind as well?

I'll be editing using Final Cut Pro software.

Thanks in advance =)
 
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I've got a half a terrabyte (4 x 250Gb) for the feature I'm editing. capture footage to one drive, collect it and consolidate it to a second with scene numbers and angle descriptions for pulling into Final Cut to edit with. I won't do that again, but I don't have a capture deck, so I have to use my XL1s and I don't want to rewind alot with it to do a proper log and capture.

One drive for my system and one for my normal computing files...mostly my CD collection.
 
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The amount of space you'll require is somewhat dependant on the format of the video you are editing. Knightly's setup of 1/2 TB (500GB) is adequate for most DV formats. For DV25, you can figure 13.5GB/hour of video. HDV is similar. DV50 is about double (25GB/hour), and uncompressed HD gets very, very large, but you probably aren't doing that.

When figuring hours, remember that you must capture, render and output and still have some room for shuffling things around and some redundancy. So if you have 30 hours of video, and you're making a 2 hour feature, you'll need at least enough for 30 hours of captured video, 2 hours of render files, and DVD master files. You may also need space for a 2 hour export, if you don't want to rely on the render files, and you should always plan on having a lot of extra space; especially if you plan on keeping this project going over a long period of time, which means you'll have to work around those project files, possibly on other, smaller projects. There may also be audio files, and some rather large software installations.

So 40 hours of DV is about 540GB or 1/2 TB! You have to determine how much raw footage you expect to have and what video formats you're shooting, but I can tell you from experience, that you should double whatever estimates you might come up with.
 
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I absolutely agree with oakstreet. I'm building a new computer and will be building a 2.5TB RAID5 array as well. I might boost it to 5TB in the near future as well.
 
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