re: Is there a way to avoid buying TB's of HD capacity and yet be able to edit my home video files later on?
Yes,
an hour of DV tape is 11GB
an hour of Mpeg2 DVD quality video is 2-4 GBs (due to selectable and variable Bitrate)
an hour of captured analog video (VHS, Video8, Hi8 etc) can be tens and tens of GBs, depending on capture quality settings and codecs used.
a 500GB disk can hold 45DV 60min cassettes or 120-200 hours of Mpeg/DVD video and is quite inexpensive (external USB/firewire disks are better for archiving, i own 8 of them)
So the only problem may come from analog video acquisition, when done at high quality. (i've seen 5 GBs for 3 minutes with MJPG)
yes, acquire your video at good quality, (no interframe, pcm audio, big files from analog sources)
do your first round of editing cutting away chunks that you know you'll never need (the worst ones)
save the result with the same hq codec (big file) and with Mpeg2 (about 10Mbps, much smaller file) for archival
Do the real editing from the big file, produce your Mpeg2/DVD HD whatever movie, burn it onto DVD blu Ray whatever
Delete the big file, keep the smaller Mpeg2 (3-4GB/hour)
You can edit the original MPEG2 file years later using an appropriate editor
Mind you, your HDD will fail, make at least a backup copy of your archival video on DVD (much better on flash ;-)
I've done editing of Mpeg2 video with both Pinnacle studio 9.4 plus and Ulead Videostudio 7 or later
i have more than 4TBs of HDD, mostly for video (internet download)
ciao
BC |
