How much storage do I need.

[rishiswaz]

I am going to be making a video log/documentary style movie of a month long trip. I was wondering how much space do I need, I am trying to keep a more portable case so it limits the amount of drives I can use but really any case with a handle preferably but anything that I can keep in a car from city to city and that I can get put on an airplane without damage would be fine (wrong category but if there is no problem suggestions would help :] ). I am expecting a total of around 1-2 hours per day being transferred onto the computer but then around a total end product of a 4-5 hour production so we will be cutting a lot of it near the end. It will be filmed in a 720p camera but it is nothing too fancy around a $500-$800 camera, and I am honestly not sure how much space it will take.

Thanks

 

[kajabla]

Do you know what format you'll be recording in? The amount of space you'll need will depend on the encoding of the video. http://web.forret.com/tools/megapixel.asp?title=QuickTime+HD+720p&width=1280&height=720
I recommend that you film 15 minutes or half an hour of video and then see how big the file is. This will eliminate encoding-based guesswork that may not turn out to be accurate. You should be able to easily extrapolate from there to gigabytes per hour, per day and for the entire trip.

 

[rishiswaz]

Ok thanks I do not know exactly the format but I know that an 30 min of 720 took 15GB so that should come out to a fitting on a 2TB hard drive. But I was also wondering if I should get four 1TB in RAID 10, 2 1TB in RAID 0, or 1 2TB drive. If you recommend RAID 10, should I get a RAID card or anything special, or can I just do a software RAID? For storage I have a 1K budget so I am not sure, anything left over would probably go to travel costs or just be saved for something else.

 

[kajabla]

I think two 2tb drives in RAID 1 would be the way to go. That'd just be redundancy in case one fails, which is fairly unlikely. You don't need speed-oriented RAID like RAID 0 or 10. Performance isn't really an issue here, as data can be written to the drive more quickly than you can record it. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36504/how-to-create-a-software-raid-array-in-windows-7/

 

[rishiswaz]

Best answer selected by Rishiswaz.