How Much Hard Drive Space?

I just returned from my documentary shoot in Maryland and I have 10-11 Hrs of HDV, I will make probably 2 more trips this year. Leaving me with about 25-30 hrs of video and 430-500 minutes to capture and edit down. I am probably going to get a mac pro book with final cut studio 5.1 and use it for editing. I want to know what size hard drive to get and if anyone can offer me any other technical reccomedations for my project
 
For my DV film, I managed to capture approx. 22-24 hours on a 350GB drive with room to spare. With all the footage, render files and special effects files I still have 75GB free.
 
I would suggest getting an external, firewire drive to capture your video on. I either read this in the FCP manual or online somewhere, but the computer and Final Cut work better when the video and project file are on a different hard drive than the FCP program files. If you decide to go this way, get whatever size drive in the actual computer that you want to hold all your iTunes music, then get an external LaCie, Maxtor or whatever firewire drive to keep the footage and project on.

Also, batch capture the footage and log and capture very meticulously, making sure you log all your clips with shot and take info and all your tapes with the reel numbers. That way, every day before you shut things down, you can just drag the FCP project file onto your computer's hard drive as a backup. If the firewire drive ever goes down, it'll suck, but at least you'll be able to recover everything by re-batch capturing your tapes. The hard drive failure has happend to us before, so that's why I know this. Any hard drive can fail whether it's external or internal and neither gives a hoot how much work you've put into the project when it does it.

Make sense?
 
I would actually recommend getting three of four identical drives with speeds of at least 7200 RPM. Set them up as a RAID 0. Keep one extra in case of failure, make them about 300GB to 450GB each.
The main thing you have to think about is worst case scenerio.
You have someone who likes the idea, they have shown interest and have lots of money to give you if you can get it done in 10 weeks.
You've captured your footage and are working it down to a 120 minute rough cut. Then with four weeks to go, your drive crashes.

Are you going to have the redundancy to recover within an hour?
Do you need that type of recovery time?
 
CootDog said:
I would actually recommend getting three of four identical drives with speeds of at least 7200 RPM. Set them up as a RAID 0. Keep one extra in case of failure, make them about 300GB to 450GB each.
The main thing you have to think about is worst case scenerio.

Two or three backups is probably overkill. I usually have backup files on one drive. And if budget is an issue, I'll simply backup my FCP file to a different drive. Even if my drive goes down (and it actually did with one of my current projects), it's a simple matter of recapturing the necessary footage.

As for the storage space from the original question, I'd go with roughly 300-400 GB drive. Firewire is preferred, but honestly I've had no problems at all with USB 2.0 drives.
 
I was saying three drives because if you do them in a RAID 0 and one fails, you'd have the spare to ensure no loss of work.
Also, with HDV, you have to make sure you're able to capture at 19.2mb/sec to 25mb/sec depending on the resolution.

If your drive fails, you don't just have to re-capture everything, you have to re-edit everything. If you've done 6 weeks of editing, and have four weeks to complete the project, there may be some serious problems which could have been avoided by simply ensuring the proper storage was configured in the beginning.

It happened to me, and with multiple projects going on at the same time it was nearly unrecoverable.
 
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If you backup the latest version of your FCP project file onto a separate drive, you should be able to just re-capture the video files and be back up an running right where you left off. The project file saves all the editing, just not the video files. The project would just say "media offline" over everything that was missing, but all cuts, effects and other edits would still be there.

However, I agree that a raid array is a great idea, if you can afford it. Re-capturing everything will obviously be time consuming if you have many hours of footage. The whole thing is made a lot easier with some detailed logging in the original capture, though.
 
I'll throw my 2 cents in here; determining whether to dedicate more $hard drive$ space to redundancy, or risk having to recapture (both valid approaches), would be based on how much one values his/her time, and how tight a schedule one is working on. Time=Money, but how much time equals how much money is the question each one of us has to answer... possibly for each project.

I'd like to add a clarification to what CootDog said about capture speed. Technically, you need to be able to capture at least 25 Megabits per second. That is about 2.6MB/second. Any modern Firewire drive will easily handle 5MB/second, so this is not a concern. Capturing seldom poses a problem, but playback can bottleneck, because while editing, you are often playing back multiple tracks, and the clips are scattered across the drive, so the head on the drive has to move around a lot, which reduces the drive's throughput. In contrast, capturing to a dedicated drive allows the write head to just step along smoothly.

Regarding the original question: 12 to 13.5 GB/hour of captured video is minimal. One will need space for render files, final versions, etc. Generally, the rule is to double the space required to actually capture, unless you're capturing for archiving only. That means 25GB/hour would be a good planning estimate, in my experience.

Side Note: One interesting snafu with HDV is that the render files may be much larger than the original captured files. I have only edited HD, not HDV, but I presume you wouldn't want your intermediates to be MPEG2 compressed. Compressing with the Apple Intermediate Codec would result in render files that were at least 2 times as large as the HDV source.
 
...I'll add the little that I know....

Its probably a good idea to have an external hard drive. I got a firewire ready one myself. I researched externals and found that Maxtor and Western Digital seem to have the best ratings so go with that if you can. I tend to want to get more power than I need. Its an investment, but get what you can afford.

Also, go to Barnes and Noble and buy Final Cut Pro For Dummies. You should probably buy the extensive manual as well, I did. However if you need to know how to do the basics right now, :D , I would suggest the for dummies book to just get started. Then when you have some less hectic time, go through the big manual....

-- spinner :cool:
 
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CootDog said:
If your drive fails, you don't just have to re-capture everything, you have to re-edit everything.

Not at all. A properly backed-up FCP file on a different drive will solve this headache. I JUST went through this when a drive failed. I have a backup file for every fifteen minutes saved to another drive. When my project drive went down, I simply opened up the most recent backup file, told it to recapture the offline footage (which was all of it) and I was back in business a few hours later (varies depending on the amount of footage).
 
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