Capture Size with SD

[robert32]

Hi,

I'm just building a new machine, specifically for digital restoration. Out of interest, what sort of file sizes (per hour of video) are people getting for capturing in standard definition (say 720*576, 25fps)? I'm talking either uncompressed, or lossless compression only.

Basically just need to do know to ascertain hard-disk capacity requirements. Currently thinking 250GB (Win, plus applications and files), 500GB capture, 500GB render.

What do you think?


Cheers,

Rob.

[unmei]

depends on the colorspace. For one, a YV12 frame takes half as many bytes as a RGB24 one, and a YUY2 67% of a RGB24 one. For the other, the colorspace you use may also limit the lossless compressors available (ie some my only support a certain colorspace).

For the relatively noisy unfiltered footage, lossless compression will most likely not drop the size much below about a third of uncompressed RGB. Of course, the less noise you have the better the compression will be.

Some examples (uncompressed):
rgb24: ~105GB/h
yuy2: ~70GB/h
yv12: ~52GB/h

+ less than 700MB/h for stereo audio

On what size harddrive to recommend, i don't know because i capture with xvid Q2 =) - which obviously takes a lot less space (~9GB/h in my typical application) . I definitly don't have have enough space to work with lossless.

[Awatef]

Hmm... I remember getting at least 2:1 compression ratio with Huffyuv.
Capturing should be done in the YUY2 color space, since most cards (if not all) work internally in YUY2.
That gives us a storage space need of about 35GB per hour by 720x576@25fps, 48KHz stereo WAV audio included.