I'm considering buying a Media Center PC (or perhaps waiting for Vista), but have no idea how much hard drive memory I need! I want to record movies from TV onto my HD but how much space do they chew up? Obviously it'll range based upon the length of the movie and the quality but say it's a 2 hour movie recorded 'good' quality - how much memory will i be using?
2006-12-07 12:06:05 · 5 answers · asked by esxonlegs 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Desktops
A good rule of thumb is 1 hour of video will use about 1GB of hard drive space. So, if your planning on doing video editing, get a BIG hard drive or two.If your wanting to know about RAM, 1GB of it would be my bare minimum for a computer used for video editing. Once again, the more the better.
You have me a bit confused with your use of "hard drive memory".
2006-12-07 14:37:25 · answer #1 · answered by mittalman53 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
If your a New PC Buyer, I say get as much Hard Disk Space as you can.
Video Storage Depends on 4 Major variables, not taking the 3 Major variables the audio uses.
Size/Resolution: You've heard about Hi Definition TV? Well HDTV video's take up more disk space than a Standard TV video. The smallest worth watching is 360x240, Current Hand Helds show at this resolution, current HD TV's are 1920 × 1080 for the 1080i/p TV's.
Colour Depth: More Colours, more Memory. This isn't really thought of as much today, as most encoders (Particularly Windows Media) use a set colour depth.
Frame Rate: how many time the image is refreshed. US TV's run at 60 "half" frame per second (FPS), or 30 full FPS. UK and Europe 50 "half" Fps or 25 "fps". It is possible to 15 fps is the bare minimum to watch any video, but it's usually more.
Encoder/compression/Encoder quality settings: Files HUGE with little encoding, but look great, and hi compression's quality . some software shrinks the file with little lost on quality.
To put it simply, dependant on your settings and setup, you can record half an hour Tv to fill a Cd-r, or about 1 1/2 hours worth, at a reasonable quality.
2006-12-07 12:52:03 · answer #2 · answered by sharpetown42 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It depends on your compression, codec and quality that you are recording at. Generally speaking, SDTV is 1GB per an hour. That is the ratio that Tivo uses. 720p is about 10GB/hr.
If you use Divx compression, it is possible to cram a 2 hour movie into 700MB file. Then, there is MPEG format, such as on a DVD, which puts 2 hours on a 4-8GB DVD. The large size is due to the surround sound and stereo audio tracks on the DVD though.
2006-12-07 15:01:47 · answer #3 · answered by techman2000 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It depends upon the kind of selection of the codec and resolution of the fnal movie. However, it grabbed about 200MB of space for a 15 min TV clip in my PC with reasonable good quality video and audio i.e. VCD quality and MPEG format.
2006-12-07 12:32:25 · answer #4 · answered by Sunny 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
it depends more on which compressor software the capture card/software in the machine is using as to how much space it takes up - this can vary wildly depending on how good a codec it is.
2006-12-07 12:08:16 · answer #5 · answered by piquet 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋