Hard drive space

Megabytes....gigabytes....terrabytes. If there's one thing you have to know about desktop video editing...VIDEOS TAKE UP A LOT OF HARD DRIVE SPACE.

I remember the days when 20GB hard drives were considered huuuuuuuge. Yes of course, there are a few of you I'm sure that can remember the megabyte hard drive days. If you haven't noticed at your local Best Buy or CompUSA, the norm these days are 200GB.....320GB.....500GB...and now 1TERRABYTE hard drives!!!

And it's not hard to figure out why we need such massive hard drives these days. In addition to videos, there are a few other things we hoard that require all this space.. music and pictures to name a few.

Music file sizes have remained the same for the most part. But the space sucking issue is due to people having massive music collections. We've been enjoying the digital music revelation now for at least 10years now, so you can imagine the size of some of the collections out there (does anybody remember napster?).

Picture file sizes have seriously grown in the last 3-5yrs. I remember my first digital camera being 2mp, and the highest resolution picture would produce a 600kb file. Now I have a 10mp camera and the hi res photos (RAW) are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7MB.

Now videos on the other hand, can eat up hard drive space like there's no tomorrow. The breakdown for mini dv uploads is about 13 gigabytes for every hour of uncompressed video.

That's huge!!

Now if you're recording video from your webcam, chances are your videos are going to be a lot smaller. But for professionals like myself (did I mention I do wedding videography??), we eat hard drives for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Presently I have....give me a second.....80...80..200....250....250..250 500...500.....over 2 terrabytes of hard drive space. And I still don't think I have enough space.

Although most of it's archive wedding videos, I do have a bunch of crap that I know with a little bit of housecleaning, I could clean out a few gigabytes.

I'm what you call a digital pack rat.

All I'm going to say about hard drives is, if you need more space....think real hard about how much space you'll need.....then double that : )


Like the old saying goes..."its better to have more, than not enough".