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Need drive space for 300 hours of footate!
I am about to start post production on a documentary with 300 hours of mini DV footage. (1 hour =12 gb/300 hours =3600gb) We will have 3 FCP systems set up at our house and want each system to injest 100 hours of footage. I’m trying to figure out what the least expensive and most reliable option is. We will have 3 people logging, digitizing and cutting sections of the movie until we get the cut down to about 10 hours, then one editor will take all the footage onto one system.
What are my options for drives? do you think we should get 7 Graids? or 3 TB raid arrays?
Thanks!
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5 Replies
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A SATA set up will be quick but you will need to get SATA cards for all three systems. FW800 will be plenty fast for dv and will not require add on cards (hopefully). OWC, Granite digital, Graid, Sonnet, Lacie and many more are all available. I built my own with cases from OWC and drives from fry’s outpost. 1T came out to 470 or so. I have been very lucky with minimal failures (one caused by my dog pulling a drive off the desk while it was running).
Just remember as you fill the drives up they will slow down, and a 500 gig drive should never be filled more than 80% (465 formated x .80 = 388.8) so add extra room.Good luck
DrewChaos is the beginning of everything.
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Hmmmm…according to my calculator 300 hours is 4.09 TB.
At this point you might seriously consider the offline RT workflow. I know I would.
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/offline_rt.html
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Agree with Shane. If you can handle the “hit” in quality, you can probably squeeze all of your footage onto one 750gig internal drive. Then you can duplicate the media to all three systems and go to town as a workgroup.
It’s a trade off… picture quality for space. What makes the most sense for your budget? Keep in mind however, if you choose the off-line workflow, your digitizing must be accurate, and your mini DV tapes must NOT have multiple TC resarts or every penny saved in off-line will be spent in on-line trying to conform mismatching timecodes.
Mark
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Very good point. MiniDV is notorious for batch conforming problems… if you can afford 5 terrabytes of storage, you might stave off some massive headaches later.
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thanks for your responses. Has anyone had experience purchasing 4 tb of drive space? we are concerned about having investors looking at low resolution cuts. Also, I doubt we have smooth runnning time code on these miniDV tapes so it seems that the cost of doing a manual online could be as much as buying the right drives in the first place. However our budget is limited so we are looking at all the options out there. what do you guys think about trying to buy used drives? has anyone had experience with the G-Raid Pro? any and all advice is welcome. THANK YOU!
sorry for the typo in the subject line.
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