Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
A lot has been written over the years of the benefits of working with the operating
system of your computer on one drive and storing your captured clips to a
separate drive. This is really the best way to configure your system, but in the
real world, a lot of people will have to use a single hard drive for the operating
system and media storage for the simple reason that they only have one hard
drive physically installed inside their computer. The professional MacPro towers
allow for a total of four drives to be installed inside the computer - G5 towers
have room for two internal drives.
Should you require more drives than your computer allows internally the
simplest option is to go for external Firewire drives. Beyond this one would
look toward SATA RAIDS.
Video at DV resolution chews up approximately 1 GB to 4.5 minutes of sound
and video. It is easy, therefore, to work out how much material you can store
on hard disk. Simply multiply the capacity of your hard drive by 4.5 and then
divide the result by 60. This will calculate the amount of storage you will get in
hours and minutes. The measurement of 4.5 minutes to the gigabyte is a
conservative estimate. You actually get slightly more. Therefore a 60 GB drive
will provide room for between 4 and 5 hours of digital video. A 200 GB drive
stores approximately 15 hours at DV resolution.
If you are working with formats of higher resolution than DV then the amount of
storage per gigabyte drops dramatically. While 1 minute of DV footage consumes
216 MB, 1 minute at the uncompressed standard definition will use 1.4 GB, and for
top-of-the-range high definition the same 1 minute will eat up 7.3 GB of hard drive
space. Furthermore, uncompressed and high definition video formats are far more
demanding and often require expensive RAIDs - this is when several drives work
together to provide fast and reliable transfer of large amounts of data. HDV has
the same requirements as DV. Other formats such as XDCam may have variable bit
rates, thus the space required will vary according to the chosen quality setting,
whereas DVCPro HD, by Panasonic, uses up 4 times the space of DV.
Firewire
Firewire is an Apple invented technology which also goes under the name of
iLink and IEEE1394. One of the remarkable features of Firewire technology,
