How large should my hard disk be to have a collection of camcorder videos?

Question

I don't use my camcorder often, only about 4 times a year maximum.

Answer 1

The best way to keep safe your videos is on DVD or vcd . For that you must capture your videos on your PC or mac using the appropriate software where you ad music effects or voice over and tittles . After doing this you have to export on some format like quick time movie or similar and build the and burn it. If you want to upload the video on the web is better if you use another compression like mpeg 4

Answer 2

This is really hard to answer without knowing how long the videos are you shoot and what format you're shooting.

Assuming you have a relatively modern camcorder that shoots in Mini-DV format (a very common digital format), a 720x480 video shot at 30 frames second (well, really 29.97, but who's counting?) will require about 200MB per minute of video. Thus, an hour of video will need about 1.2GB of storage. If you shoot a couple of hours of video each time you use your camera, you don't need a very big disk drive at all (not by the standards of today's drives).

Another way to say it: a 250 GB drive will cost you less than $100, and will hold about 200 hours of video.

Answer 3

Mark H had a typo, I think he meant 12 GB instead of 1.2 GB. This is for just-captured mini-dv video. Even if you dont edit, you could at least put your videos into an editor and compress an hour to around 2-4 GB still with good quality. So if you do that, anything above 80 (or even 60) will be fine. Hope this helps!