-
File Sizes/Storage
Hello everyone. I have a basic question about what you do with your video files. I’ve recently worked on two projects, about four minutes long each, and my 1TB hard drive is basically completely full! I backed up one project on an external hard drive, along with a lot of the original AVCHD files from my camcorder. The other project is still taking 344 GB on my computer right now, and its only 4 minutes long! This isn’t even counting audio projects I’m trying to work on in cubase
How do you guys work on multiple projects 2 plus hours? Seems like I’d need tons and tons of storage, but am I doing something wrong? Just curious about how you all organize and set this stuff up.
-
14 Replies
-
[David Lord] “The other project is still taking 344 GB on my computer right now, and its only 4 minutes long! “
That’s over 1GB per second if my math is right? Are you working with raw uncompressed 14-bit video from the new Blackmagic 8K Cinema Camera? 🙂
Those 344GB might be including temp and cache files – which you certainly don’t need to back up or archive. If not, could you look into, what’s using all that space?
-
Ditto Alex’s response! AVCHD video clips, similar to DV and HDV in size, should take no more than about 13GB per hour. Something is amiss…even if you rendered out uncompressed HD masters, much smaller than that!
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Sorry, I should clarify. My original footage is AVCDH, but I’ve converted it to DNxHD 170 to make the editing easier. The compressed format was way too choppy and glitchy to work with.
So yeah, I recorded about 5 hours or so worth of footage for the project, convered it to the DNxHD format, then imported all of it into my premiere project for editing the 4 minute video. Any advice on how I could do it differently? I eventually want to do longer projects. Should i invest in another camera?
-
If I understand you right, the project is four minutes but it comes with five hours of source files converted from originals?
The only things I can think of:
1. Discard the converted files if you’re done with the project: you could always convert them again if you need to re-edit
… or…
2. Figure out why the originals are choppy to edit (slow system?), and address that.
— Alex Gerulaitis | Systems Engineer | DV411 – Los Angeles, CA
-
I was told that it’s common to convert AVCHD files, as they’re a difficult format to edit in. AVCHD files are compressed, so for premiere to work with them, it first has to uncompress, and then work with the footage including any effects, plug ins etc.. so its more taxing on the cpu than dealing with uncompressed files.
Deleting the old files will work for now, but I’m trying to figure out what I need to do when I’m working on a longer project, or even multiple projects at once. How much storage does everyone typically need?
-
Tell me about your editing hardware specs – AVCHD should edit just fine in Premiere. Could be as simple as a video card upgrade to get the GPU acceleration enabled for instance. Sounds like a lot of extra work to convert all the footage.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
I’ve got the latest imac. 3.4Ghz i7 processor, nvidia GeForce GTX 680 2048MB card. 32MB ram. 1TB fusion hard drive (I think 130 GB are SSD).
Plus I followed some youtube video on bypassing premiere’s list of acceptable graphics cards to enable my graphics card for the GPU acceleration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSsoZUUKuM
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
Hi David,
That computer is certainly up to the task, not sure why playback would be poor. Is Playback Resolution set to FULL in Program Monitor?
Do you have a dedicated hard drive for the video assets?
Which camera are you using?
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
A dedicated hard drive I dont have. I have all my video files stored on the same hard drive as my OS, and everything else. I’ll have to check when I get home if the resolution is set to full.
My camera is just a little Sony Hdr CX-160. Nothing fancy, but it shoots in HD, so I got it for doing these little video projects I’m working on. Haha, thats why I was so surprised to see how quickly hard drive space is eaten up! I have no clue how people are doing longer projects. What kind of storage is typical?
-
A single 1TB drive ought to hold about 70+ hours of AVCHD footage. It’s the conversion to DNxHD that’s eating all your space. Editors that typically work with ProRes, DNxHD, etc. will have large RAID arrays with multiple drives (4, 8, or more) with 8TB, 16TB, 24TB, etc.
But back to basics, there should be no need to do any conversion with your setup. Something just occurred to me – how do you get the AVCHD footage from memory card into Premiere? That can make a difference with editing performance!
Best practice is to COPY the entire contents of the SD card to your hard drive, unaltered. This means do not use the Sony utility software either, just straight copy of ALL folders. Do not pick and choose video clips to copy, folder structure from camera must be maintained.
In Premiere, rather than “File > Import”, use the “Media Browser” to bring in the desired clips. I have seen this fix playback issues. The Media Browser correctly interprets the video codec and associated audio and tells Premiere how to play them. If you just drag the .mp4 or whatever into Premiere directly, sometimes there are playback issues.
Start a NEW project and try a quick test and see if it helps
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up