ipod as my storage space? Good idea, Bad idea?

W

WonderWorks

. Im looking for a external hard drive. I work on a G5 mac but, dont want to save video on the internal hard drive. what would be good for video. Im gonna try and get one off ebay. on a tight budget. any suggestions? How about the new 60gb video ipod? its priced at $399 but with its features its a good investment. im pretty new to video so heres the Video capacityon the ipod maybe some one could help me., it is based on 4 minutes per H.264 750-Kbps video combined with 128-Kbps audio. Is that good for storing. Some distortion maybe?
 
you would be storing files on the iPod as if it were a hard drive. The drive itself is slow, so it'll work as a storage drive, but not necessarily one to edit from. They used them to transfer file to peter jackson during lord of the rings. remember that if you only have one copy of the data, a corrupt hard drive will ruin your day.
 
i've had the best luck w/ LaCie, especially for Mac, but another option is to buy a case for an external hard drive, and then get a nice big internal HD to put in it. Depending on your project size, you will probably need anywhere from 90-300 gB, and DON'T FORGET TO BUY A FIREWIRE NOT USB, YOU WILL BE GLAD YOU DID!




p.s. sidenote: if you get a LaCie (and this may apply to other drives too, I'm not sure) MAKE SURE TO UNPLUG IT BEFORE INSTALLING ANY MAJOR UPDATES TO OSX!!! (I learned this the hard way)
 
Isn’t video stored on the iPod very compressed? I would think the iPod is really for watching video on the go, not storing footage. And at about $6.60 per gig, it’s very expensive. External drives are running under a buck a gig now.

I have five Neptune drives. I haven’t had a single problem with any of them and I use them pretty hard. I have one Maxor - it too, works well. My one LaCie crashed and died on me.
 
if you're storing the video to be watched on the ipod, then yes...it's very heavily compressed video.

If you're using it as you would an external firewire Hard Disk, then you can put full DV files on it (or HDV), or word docs, or jpgs, or scripts done in whatever screenwriting software you're using, or quickbooks files...or e-mails...ad nasuem. It's really just a hard drive with a custom hardware interface slapped onto it.
 
I just had my "DOH!" moment, knightly. Of course it's just a hard drive. So at $400, it's a very expensive 60GB external drive.
 
I've used LaCie pretty exclusively. The only time I've had a problem was when we got one of the Porsche versions of the LaCie drive. Good cars, bad external hard drives. Go figure. Here's (a new link to) what I use to go between my iMac G5 and the G5 tower at our office:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...ref=sr_1_1/104-3571804-3620769?_encoding=UTF8

Seems to get mixed reviews but it hasn't failed me yet. This is proabably the fourth LaCie drive that we've gotten between myself and my office. We use them all the time.
 
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Apple store links are linked to sessions and won't let you link from them correctly. You'll just have to paste in the details for us.
 
DV Gear Website said:
Both the DV standard of 720 x 480 video and the DV PAL standard of 720 x 576 video with 5:1 compression require 3.6 MB/sec and 4.52 min/GB. So not only does your hard drive need to read/write faster than 4 MB/sec, but it must be large enough to save all of your video.
Click to expand...

More info...

This is all pretty 'heady' stuff, but interesting none-the-less, and can be useful if you know all the numbers to plug in.

How to calculate Disk Space for Digital Video
  1. To calculate the size in kilobytes (K) of one frame of uncompressed video, use the following formula:
    • Frame size K = ([Pixel Width x Pixel Height x Bit Depth] / 8) / 1024
  2. Where 8 represents an 8-bit byte, and 1024 equals the number of bytes per kilobytes. For example, the size in kilobytes of an uncompressed frame of full-size (640 x 480), 24-bit video is:
    • Frame size K = ([640 x 480 x 24] / 8) / 1024 = 900K
  3. To determine the file size of one second of uncompressed video, multiply the image size by the number of frames per second (fps). For example, one second of uncompressed, full-size, full-speed (30 fps), 24-bit video is:
    • 900K x 30 = 27 MB
  4. To determine how compression affects file size, divide the file size by the compression ratio. For example, a 10:1 compression ratio will make a 27 MB file 2.7 MB.
  5. When processing an image pan, most software requires three image buffers and up to 3 MB of memory for application overhead. To determine how much memory is needed to process an image pan use the following formula:
    • Memory MB = (image size x 3) + 3
    • For example, to process an image pan for an 8 MB image, you need 27 MB of memory.

How to calculate Disk Space for Digital Audio
To determine the size of an audio file, use the following formulas:
  • 8-bit mono: Seconds x kHz = Size
  • 8-bit stereo: (Seconds x kHz) x 2 = Size
  • 16-bit mono: (Seconds x kHz) x 2 = Size
  • 16-bit stereo: ([Seconds x kHz] x 2) x 2 = Size
For example, the file size for 30 seconds of 16-bit, 11kHz mono audio is:
  • (30 x 11) x 2 = 660K

This value is an approximation because 1K = 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes. The results are accurate enough to estimate data rates.

*** By the way, the DV codec uses a 5:1 compression ratio. One hour of NTSC format miniDV footage will take 12.96GB, 10.81GB for PAL format Keep in mind that this is for 29.97fps and 25fps respectively, and doesn't take into account shooting at other frame rates. However, if you're shooting in 24p on a DVX, it stores the data on tape as 30fps(frames/sec) aka 60i (60 fields/sec) Non-Drop-Frame video.

Useful/Helpful Links:
DVGear Hard drive space Guide
 
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