Hard Drives - Video Editing
A Hard drives size, speed and performance is very important with the demanding applications used for video editing and the storage needed for video. Learn how you can add a hard drive and which one will be best. The Good News is it's not to hard or expensive to increase your hard drive space and quality.
Did you know the more you have on your hard drive the slower it goes.
How much space does video take up on my hard drive?
One hour of Mini DV digital video 720 - 480 recorded to your computer is about 11gb of space.
Lets look in more detail at many of the common new formats out there.
How much space video formats use in a hard drive
720 x 480 DV 4:1:1 Data rate: 25Mbps 11GB per hour of video
720 x 480 DV50 4:2:2 Data rate: 50Mbps 22GB per hour of video
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Data rate: 100Mbps 44GB per hour of video
How much space (HD) High Definition Video uses in a hard drive
720 x 486 4:2:0 Our services include: Video production, Video Editing, Audio Editing, Web Video Services and more!
Data rate: 210Mbps 92GB per hour of video
1280 x 720/24p 4:2:0 Data rate: 332Mbps 146GB per hour of video
1280 x 720/60p 4:2:0 Data rate: 818Mbps 364GB per hour of video
1920 x 1080/24p 4:2:0 Data rate: 746Mbps 328GB per hour of video
1920 x 1080/60i 4:2:0 Data rate: 932Mbps 410GB per hour of video
Which hard drive should you I use for video editing
You can use external hard drives or internal ones. External usually connect with USB or Firewire. You may just want to install your hard drive a hard drive internally. Internal hard drives can connect to your computer 2 ways.
There is SATA drives and ATA drives both having different data and power connections on the back of the drives.
SATA drives are more convenient to install and drawing less power, SATA drives have performance benefits that really set them apart from ATA drives. SATA drives beat ATA drives in power consumption and performance.
The speed at which you transfer data such as high quality video is usually measured in Megabytes Per Second (Mbs). The higher this is the faster your hard drive works.
SATA - 150 Mbs - 300 Mbps per second.
For video editing you really want to have a special SATA drive attached to your computer solely for video.
SATA has a great way to transfer information. They are increasing speeds to 600 MBs.
External Hard Drive - eSATA, USB 2.0 - up to 480Mbits/s
Fireware Drive - 400 Mbps - For a few reasons FireWire is slightly faster than USB 2.0 even though the stats are lower. Sometimes you have many devices using USB putting much more traffic on the USB communication paths and slowing the ability to use a USB hard drive.
FireWire 800 uses a 9-pin connector, which should be more reliable and cause fewer problems.
The speed of your FireWire hard disk is dependent on the speed of the bridge chip.
USB 2.0 Speed - 480 Mbps - Adding a bunch of USB devices to your system can cause problems.
USB is supposed to provide even greater bandwidth, but don't use it
for video editing because you will constantly get dropped frames.
ATA Speed = 100MBps or 133MBps. Probably want to avoid these as the SATA drive beats it in many specifications.
Warning! Your computer hardware's will eventually fail!
Get another drive and back everything up before it's too late!
Video Data Rates
The quality of video is going up so much that hard drives speeds have become an issue. In time this may not be a problem but look at the data rates of video to see how much more High definition video requires.
The Format of most old digital cameras was DV & HDV which has a data rate of 3.75 MBs
New 1080i HD (Uncompressed 10-bit) has a data rate of 150 MBs. WHAT A DIFFERENCE!
 Nowadays your home computer with rather large storage but when it comes to digital video you are talking about loads of space needed. It is better to have a separate drive for all your editing as it is quite allot of extra strain on your computer.
The hard drive on the right is an External Hard Drive powered by Western Digital. The Elements external hard drive holds 1TB of data and is priced well below 150 dollars. Well worth having somewhere to store all your work.
Partitioning Data and Boot Drives is a way that 1 drive can become 2 with a special area for editing:
It is best to run video editing applications from their own boot partition (meaning they have there own special space on a hard drive) so they can function without distraction from other running applications such as web browsers or games that are memory and CPU-hungry. Other video editing applications can be installed in the video partition space.
Saving your work will take a little extra time and money but it is a necessity.
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