Is There a Way To Calculate Hard Drive Space Needed When Importing?

[Bret Williams]

ProRes is roughly a gig a minute. Less if you shoot 24p and/or 720p.

[Bill Davis]

I’m pretty sure Digital Rebellion still has their Video Disk Space Calculator up on-line.

Choose your format and length, and it calculates the file size.

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[Ned Miller]

I do not see AVCHD in their calculator:

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/webapps/video_calc.html

Or am I suppose to be looking at Pro Res?

Ned Miller
Chicago Videographer
http://www.nedmiller.com
www,bizvideo.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

AJA Data Calc for iOS is good if you have iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aja-datacalc/id343454572?mt=8

Jeremy

[Bill Davis]

If you’re transcoding (Optimized or Proxy generation) on ingest then you’d probably use ProRes 422 to figure out how much space the teranscoded files will occupy on your drive. But unless you toss your original media, you’s be doubling up on file space.

I’m not familiar enough with AVCHD to know for sure, but I suspect it’s not an actual CODEC with a fixed data rate, as much as a container format such as WMV or QuickTime that can hold streams with varying data profiles. If so no calculator app would be accurate without more data on the encoded stream specs.

I don’t see much AVCHD, so I just don’t know for sure. Someone else?

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Jeremy Garchow]

AVCHD is indeed a codec. It is an h264 variant.

It typically has a data rate of around 24-28 Mbits/second but can be lower.

16GB of avchd will import as 16GB of rewrapped h264.

The conversion to ProRes will be significantly larger. A Gig per minute, as Bret says, is a good rough estimate.

[Jon Chappell]

Our iOS and Mac calculators have more codecs than the online version:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/video-space/id492916201?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/video-space-calculator/id520581399?mt=12

Also, I’m not sure if AJA has fixed this, but last time I looked at their app I noticed they were using a weird way of calculating the size that made it inaccurate in the real-world tests I tried.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools – Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools – Edit QuickTime chapters and metdata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools…