H 264 file size for 1 hr of HD video

Question

I m looking for an order of magnitude estimate for expected on-disk file size for 1 hour of H 264 encoded HD video transcoded from HDV  HD on a MiniDV tape   I want to archive approximately 100 hours of such content and want to figure out whether I m looking at a big hard drive  a multi-drive unit like a Drobo  or an enterprise-level storage system   Edit  To clarify from several good comments  I am developing the software that will use this archived video and will also manage the transcoding from HDV to compressed format  using QuickTime on OS X   This question is for gathering hardware requirements  The video is from HDV and the transcoding does not have to happen in real time  I will not be streaming the video  so I m looking for compression that maintains as much information as possible form the HDV content  The original HDV video is interlaced  but I can deinterlace it if that would help either file size or quality of the H264 compressed output

User · Answer

It really depends on many settings  on both the audio and video side of things  If you follow the compression-settings of this video  then it s approximately 3GB per hour  If you have a Mac  I would definitely recommend using  Compressor  as it is fairly easy to use and works flawless   As far as storage is concerned  if you re looking at 100hrs   300GB  I would definitely go with an external hard drive  Video files are so huge  that they  even if they don t totally fill up your hard disk  really do confuse your computer   Make sure to make some time for compressing the whole thing because it takes hours and hours and hours     for 100 hrs worth of footage  it ll take days

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It is whatever size you want it to be  the only thing that changes is quality  If you intend it to be played back on a non-PC device  or a slow PC   you may need to respect a certain profile  standardized set of compression settings that ensure a fixed device can play back the content    You can see the main H 264 profiles at Wikipedia  While it is highly subjective  and highly dependent on the content being compressed   it is claimed that H 264 can achieve the same quality as DVD MPEG2 using half the bitrate

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I m a friend of keeping the original files  so that you can still use the archived original ones and do new encodes from these fresh ones when the old transcodes are out of date  eg  migrating them from previously transocded mpeg2-hd to mpeg4-hd  and perhaps from mpeg4-hd to its successor in sometime   but all of these should be done from the original  any compression step will followed by a loss of quality  it will need some time to redo this again  but in my opinion it s worth the effort   so  if you want to keep the originals  you can use the running time in seconds of you tapes times the maximum datarate of hdv  constants 27mbit s I think  to get your needed storage capacity

User · Answer

Around 4gb hr is quite common

User · Answer

If you know the bitrate  it s simply bitrate  bits per second  multiplied by number of seconds  Given that HDV is 25 Mbit s and one hour has 3 600 seconds  non-transcoded it would be   25 Mbit s   3 600 s hr     3 125 MB s   3 600 s hr     11 250 MB hr      11 GB hr   Google s calculator can confirm  The same applies with H 264 footage  although the above might not be as accurate  being variable bitrate and such       I want to archive approximately 100 hours of such content and want to figure out whether I m looking at a big hard drive  a multi-drive unit like a Drobo  or an enterprise-level storage system    First  do not buy an  enterprise-level  storage system  you almost certainly don t need things like hot-swap drives and the same level of support - given the costs     I would suggest buying two big drives  One would be your main drive  another in a USB enclosure  and would be connected daily and mirror the primary system  as a backup    Drives are incredibly cheap  using the above calculation of  11 GB hour  that s only 1 1 TB of data  for 100 hours  uncompressed   and you can buy 2 TB drives now   Drobo  or a machine with a few drives and software RAID is an option  but a single large drive plus backups would be simpler   Storage is almost a non-issue now  but encode time can still be an issue  Encoding H 264 is very resource-intensive  On a quad-core  2 5 GHz Xeon  I think I got around 60 fps encoding standard-def  DVD  to H 264  compared to around 300 fps with MPEG 4   I suppose that s only about 50 hours  but it s something worth considering  Also  assuming the HDV is on tapes  it s a 1 1 capture time  so that s 150 hours of straight processing  never mind things like changing tapes  entering metadata  and general delays  sleep  and errors   opps  wrong tape

User · Answer

For a good quality x264 encoding of 1060i  done by a computer  not a mobile device  not in real time  you could use a bitrate at about 5 MBps  That means 2250 MB hour of encoded material  Recommend you deinterlace the footage and compress as progressive

User · Answer

It would be a couple of gigs per hour    MPEG-4  of which H 264 is a sub-part  define high quality as around 4Mbps  which would be 1 8GB per hour   This can vary depending on the type of video and the type of compression used

[video] H.264 file size for 1 hr of HD video

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