Video and hard drive space

[USC96]

I just got a digital video camera and made some home movies of my kids. It seems for every 3 minutes, I use up about 500 mb of disk space. This seems a little high to me. I have two seasons of the office (10 episodes a season x 20 or so minutes per episode) on my ipod and that only takes up 20 gb.

Does anyone have any pointers for minimizing disk space with video? If not, does anyone have a recommendation for an external hard drive for an Imac? Thanks.

 

[Lord Zedd]

Check your camera's settings, there should be options for compression or lower resolution.

 

[czachorski]

Is the camera SD or HD?

SD camera record in DV stream at 12 GB/hour native. If you import it straight in, it will come in at the size. I have imported all my DV videos into iMovie 6 and then compressed them to h264 at about 3000 kbits/sec, which preserves the quality nicely, and gives a file size around 1.5 GB per hour. Then I imported them for archiving/editing into iMovie 8. Not sure if there is an easier way to do this with iMovie 8 - I don't use SD footage anymore.

If it is an HD camera, then 10 GB per hour is about as small as you are going to get and still have high quality imports.

 

[USC96]

Is the camera SD or HD?

SD camera record in DV stream at 12 GB/hour native. If you import it straight in, it will come in at the size. I have imported all my DV videos into iMovie 6 and then compressed them to h264 at about 3000 kbits/sec, which preserves the quality nicely, and gives a file size around 1.5 GB per hour. Then I imported them for archiving/editing into iMovie 8. Not sure if there is an easier way to do this with iMovie 8 - I don't use SD footage anymore.

If it is an HD camera, then 10 GB per hour is about as small as you are going to get and still have high quality imports.

Thanks. It's DV. I've played around with it and it appears that I can download using a lesser resolution (imovie calls it "large"). I'll try that this afternoon and report back.

With all the imovie, iphoto and garageband capabilities, I think I'm going to need to get a good external HD. Any recommendations?

 

[czachorski]

Thanks. It's DV. I've played around with it and it appears that I can download using a lesser resolution (imovie calls it "large"). I'll try that this afternoon and report back.

With all the imovie, iphoto and garageband capabilities, I think I'm going to need to get a good external HD. Any recommendations?

People will have brand preferences, but I don't think you can go that wrong with an external. If you don't have anything else using your firewire 800 port, it might be a consideration to get one with that. It will use up one less USB or firewire 400 port, and the firewire 800 higher throughout may be beneficial when working with video.

BTW - what settings does iMovie use when it brings in a file as large, and what file sizes result? You can compress DV stream a lot before you will notice any significant degradation with footage from most consumer camcorders. But you can go too far too. My guess is it is some form of h-264, and hopefully at least 640x480, 24-30 fps, and at least 1 GB per hour. Anything less and I would be worried for the quality of your precious video.