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Hard Drive Issue With The Sony HDR-SR1

March 26th, 2008 · 3 Comments

I received an email from Kim in the Balkins and I can’t help her cause I’ve stayed as far away as I could from the AVCHD hard drive camcorders. Here is her issue…

camera

I am using the Sony HDR-SR1 camera with FCP 6.0.2 on a MacBook Pro with upgraded ram. I am not having any trouble ingesting the footage but I am having some issues with hard drive space. I have been traveling in the Balkans shooting some short doc pieces. I filled up my 500GB external, had to buy a second one and have already filled that up. I still have more footage to download. I shot in HD but I can’t figure out why it is taking up so much space. The hard drive on the camera is only 30 GB but every time I have downloaded the camera is seems to chew up more like 150 GBs or more of space on the external. I am sure there is something I don’t know about compression settings or something. Is there anything I can do or is this just how it works? If there is something to be done is there a way to change the setting for the footage that I have already imported? Or can I only make the adjustment from here on out? Thank you so much for your help. All the best. Kim

Anyone have a suggestion besides smashing the camcorder? I’m sure Kim would love to hear about it.

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Tags: Final Cut Pro · Help

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Brian // Mar 26, 2008 at 10:42 pm

    Keep in mind that one hour of DV takes about 13 gigabytes, while one hour of HDV video takes from 38-50 gb, depending on the complexity of the video being encoded.

    Exact:

    1080 23.98 10 bit 4:2:2 uncompressed = 448 GB per hour, or 7.4 GB a minute.

    1080 23.98 10 bit 4:2:2 DNxHD 220 = 79 GB per hour or 1.3 GB per minute.

  • 2 Darren // Mar 27, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    Ingesting the AVCHD footage via FCP involves importing it as Apple Intermediate Codec, which is larger in file size.

    Read this post for more:

    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6565629&#6565629

  • 3 Jeron // Mar 30, 2008 at 1:20 am

    I just bought an HDR-SR11 (60gb model) and it works great. Haven’t tried importing via FCP, as I’ve not upgraded to Studio 2 yet, but for simple home movies and such, it works fine in iMovie08. That said, the file sizes are huge, as mentioned above. I’m storing footage on a 500gb drive, but I’m pretty sure I’d feel safer on a TB… dammit. =/

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