Storage Calculators

11/8/2011

It's a really good idea before you book your edit, to gauge how much space you will ultimately require. A wrong estimate can lead to additional charges in a facility or you can simply run out of drive space in your home/office set up.
Luckily there are a couple of Calculators which will ease your pain.
For Final Cut there is a great free disc space calculator widget from Digital Heaven, for use on a mac, iphone or ipad: http://www.videospaceonline.com/
For Avid I would go online and use the Avid Storage Calculator:
http://www.avid.com/US/resources/avid-storage-calculator
This allow you to compare the amount of storage you would need at different resolutions in graphical form. In the example below I have 10 hours of footage at 2.1, 2.1S, and 15.1 resolutions.
Slightly less simple but with many more options, for Avid and FCP, is the Digital Rebellion Video Space Calculator. This is another online calculator. But unlike the others it also has conversion charts for other codecs such as h.264 (Canon 5D), Red, Maya, and many others. This is useful if you want to backup your acquisition disks to the media drive. Particularly useful for FCPX and Adobe Premiere Pro which are both designed to work with native codecs.
http://www.digitalrebellion.com/webapps/video_calc.html
Now remember you never want your media drive more than 90% full - ever. And during the edit, on whatever system you choose, there is going to be a lot of rendering and extra media fed into the project, music/sfx/graphics etc. after the rushes have been loaded. So, erring on the side of caution on a long job, it might be a good rule of thumb to estimate that your rushes will be 50/60% of the required disc space.
Have a nice day.