Storage and Compression

Beginner wrote on 11/5/2001, 3:39 PM

As a beginner, I'm curious about starting a Digital Videography business (home based) for me and my wife. Im building a compouter and would like to know how much HDD space I will need. Should I buy a 40gig, a 60 gig or 100gig HDD. And the seek time and rps I wil need to know also.

7200 rps? Any good brands? What are you using? And how much space do your rendered videos take up?

Last question. How do you compress a file to a CD rom so a family member or customer can view the file?

Comments

wvg wrote on 11/5/2001, 4:33 PM

You can never have too big a hard drive. :-) I always get one twice as big as I think I need at the time. I wouldn't buy anything smaller than a 40 GB if you plan on doing serious video work and since the price difference between a 40 and a 80 or even a 100GB isn't that much more, if it don't blow your budget get the larger one. Get a IDE Ultra 100 that runs at 7200 RPM. Brand? I was never disapointed with the IBM deskstar series. I also like my Maxtor 80 GB firewire. It really does transfer at 400MB a minute. That's fast!

Video editing eats up hard drive space very quickly. You should only edit in AVI format or if you have a digital camera stay digital.

Your last qustion depends on HOW your customer is going to play the CD. If only off his PC, it really don't matter what format you render in, you're just limited to how much you can put on the CD, which is this case is just used for storage.

However if you want to play the CD off many set top DVD players you MUST use a specific format either PAL or NTSC video CD encoded at MPEG-1 for VCD or MPEG-2 for SVCD. NTSC is used in the United States and Japan, pretty much the rest of world uses PAL.

Video Factory only supports MPEG-1 for VCD. If you want to go the extra mile and get higher quality edit in VF, render as AVI, then finish up in TMPGENC which has more rendering options and ways to improve the final video.

If you really want to impress your future customer get a DVD burner and make DVD disks.