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

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.

Answer 1

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").