I was wondering...how much disk space do you guys have on your capture-drive before you clutter it up with beautiful moving images?

I'm capturing from my XL-1s at DV AVI full, which is supposed to be 15 minutes per gig. I'm getting more like 8 to 10.


Fig

You need a MINIMUM of 10% of your drive space left after the capture. Anything less can cause dropped frames and other unpleasantness. On my 120GB deskstar, if I get down to 20GB left, I consider it full.

The actual figure is 12+ minutes per GB. That is what is recorded to tape by the XL1 and that is what it plays back.

I was getting 5 minutes per gig uncompressed, am i over killing it? I to agree with the 10% rule but you might be able to get a way with more if you have seperate hard drives. Like you're editing system is running off hard drive a with 9 gig's and only 1 free WHile all of your media is being recorded on to drive b with 120 gigs and maybe just 5 or 6 free. perhaps even less. though I'd check the heck out of some permissions (or defrag) if it get's much lower

Jeff, I always thought it was 4.5 minutes per gig in Windows (I'm using Cinestream which is based on QT)?

I have 120 GB WD as my video drive. That gives you gobs of editing room and when you are done with the project, you can just wipe the drive and move on. Better still is the Firestore where you can just copy all the data to hard drives or edit on the Firestore drives.

You should be careful about defragging a drive while still in production. In some packages that can cause confusion. It is better to let the NLE clear off the spare disk space. After you are done, you can wipe the disk clear and start up with the next project.

I agree. Video captured frrm MiniDV will run roughly 4.5 minutes per gigabyte. The data stream is based on a 25 megabit/second video stream and a 48 kHz/16-bit stereo audio stream, plus some overhead.

If you use a different compression scheme (e,g., one of the MPEG formats) the file sizes wil be different.

As drives get full they become less efficient, speed wise.