HDV editing storage at DVinfo.net

Josh Martin · October 8th, 2004, 04:45 PM

Hey all! I'm purchasing the new sony HD camera when it comes out and I need some pointers. I'll be purchasing a dual G5 with 4gig RAM for editing. What I'm not sure about is Hard Drive space. I really don't know much about this new format and how much through-put you need to edit this stuff. Should I be able to use a firewire RAID, or do I need a xserve RAID? I would really appreciate so help with this. Thanks,
Josh

Kevin Shaw · October 9th, 2004, 09:05 PM

A lot depends on how you're going to end up editing your HDV footage. If Apple implements "native" HDV editing in Final Cut Pro then hard drive bandwidth shouldn't be a concern, because the native bandwidth is the same for a layer of 1080i HDV as it is for a layer of DV. If you convert your source footage to the DVCProHD format, that's 12.5 MB/sec per layer of video, so you could still do some editing on any good modern hard drive.

I would caution you that until Apple gets their HDV solution working in FCP, you may find that editing HDV on a Macintosh computer will be a bit of a hassle. I've also heard reports of problems generating and playing Windows Media HD output on Macs, which is an issue because this is going to be one of the more popular output formats for HDV work. More generally, we still haven't seen a good answer for how we're going to distribute finished HDV projects, and that may be a problem for the better part of another year yet.

I'm real interested in the HDV format, but I'm not going to rush to jump in just yet. Maybe by next summer...

October 8th, 2004, 04:45 PM	#1
Josh Martin Regular Crew Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 29	HDV editing storage Hey all! I'm purchasing the new sony HD camera when it comes out and I need some pointers. I'll be purchasing a dual G5 with 4gig RAM for editing. What I'm not sure about is Hard Drive space. I really don't know much about this new format and how much through-put you need to edit this stuff. Should I be able to use a firewire RAID, or do I need a xserve RAID? I would really appreciate so help with this. Thanks, Josh

October 9th, 2004, 09:05 PM	#2
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	A lot depends on how you're going to end up editing your HDV footage. If Apple implements "native" HDV editing in Final Cut Pro then hard drive bandwidth shouldn't be a concern, because the native bandwidth is the same for a layer of 1080i HDV as it is for a layer of DV. If you convert your source footage to the DVCProHD format, that's 12.5 MB/sec per layer of video, so you could still do some editing on any good modern hard drive. I would caution you that until Apple gets their HDV solution working in FCP, you may find that editing HDV on a Macintosh computer will be a bit of a hassle. I've also heard reports of problems generating and playing Windows Media HD output on Macs, which is an issue because this is going to be one of the more popular output formats for HDV work. More generally, we still haven't seen a good answer for how we're going to distribute finished HDV projects, and that may be a problem for the better part of another year yet. I'm real interested in the HDV format, but I'm not going to rush to jump in just yet. Maybe by next summer...