question Storage for light video editing

[Adcadet]

Hey gang,
I've been shooting home video lately, and expect to shoot even more in the coming years. So far, editing the video using the included software and my old hardware has been painful (using the included Canon software). I'm planning on rebuilding my PC in a few months. I don't expect to be doing anything that I'd consider heavy video editing anytime soon, just basic clipping and splicing of relatively short clips (usually a few minutes or less in length with my Canon Vixia M300, typically shot in 1920 x 1080 in AVCHD). What do you guys typically recommend for storage in this situation. Do I simply need a high STR and thus even something like a WD Caviar Green would be fine?

 

[ddrueding]

Do I simply need a high STR and thus even something like a WD Caviar Green would be fine?

Yup. There shouldn't be much seek action, so anything will do. Depending on your CPU (or GPU if the software supports it), even a 2.5" 7.2k would keep up.

 

[Mercutio]

If I might make a suggestion, Hitachi's 5-platter, 7200rpm 2TB drives are hovering around $115. Tons of space, high STR, not a WD. All the qualities you should be looking for.

"Green" 5400rpm drives actually do pretty OK for a lot of stuff; they're great for backups and bulk storage, but from the little bit I've played with AVCHD to MPEG2 conversions in S*ny Vegas, something that isn't even really editing, that a "green" drive was a substantial bottleneck.

 

[Adcadet]

The Hitachi 7k2000 is now down to $110 with a promo code (EMCZNZR58). I have on in my case already and I'm reasonably happy with it. I hear they are relatively hot and noisy (because they're 5 platter?), but I don't notice either in my case.

 

[Stereodude]

Are you sure it's STR bound not CPU bound?

 

[Mercutio]

Are you sure it's STR bound not CPU bound?

I noticed a subjective difference for AVCHD to MPEG2 conversion going from a Samsung "green" drive as the location for the source file to doing the same work on an internal 7200rpm model on the same machine. Maybe 15% faster? Not huge, but noticeable.

 

[Stereodude]

If your CPU's cores are pegged than it's not HD STR limited.

 

[Mercutio]

Vegas might not have been. If I still had the source file I'd try it again.

 

[blakerwry]

If your CPU's cores are pegged than it's not HD STR limited.

While I would expect encoding to be completely CPU bound, other tasks involved with video editing - such as decoding, clipping, mixing, etc - could easily be disk bound.

 

[Stereodude]

While I would expect encoding to be completely CPU bound, other tasks involved with video editing - such as decoding, clipping, mixing, etc - could easily be disk bound.

Maybe, but he's dealing with a heavily compressed data format which means the data rates for the video files are low, like 5MB/sec, so I would expect some other part of the process to bottleneck it before the STR of the drives do. Plus a lot of video editing programs like to decompress and recompress video files since mpeg data types are hard to edit losslessly (unless you only cut on key (I) frames and do nothing to the video.