Hiya - First of all im pretty new to video editing but know a bit and i use pinnacle studio sometimes. Ive recentely decided that id like to put all my mums raw footage on a large hard drive or dvds so she can access any of it easily as shes recently started editing on her pc. Shes got firewire plus pinnacle and most stuff is in mini dv format other stuff is on hi8. Basically What the best way to store, say 20hrs of raw footage digitaly and what do I need(do I need to wait a few more years until hds get bigger?? )

20 hours of dv video at 3.5 mb/sec;
20x60x60x3.5 mb total;
252000 mb;
252 gig.

There you go, the whole lot will fit on one hard drive.

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Store all the raw footage on a hard disk and only burn the polished version out onto DVD. That way you can go back at a later date and change the edits around. If you or your mum have a hard drive above 252Gb then fine, but if you don't it will mean a trip to the local computer store to buy and install a second one. I'd go for the internal version as opposed to one of the external ones. Go for a hard disk that is bigger than your requirements as files soon start to mount up from all the editing and clips, and still images, and rendered audio files etc etc.

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