Storing Your Digital Video Masterpiece
Published: September 3, 2003
By Jason Dunn
If there's one factor that dominates digital video on a computer, it's the sheer space that the video takes up.
Questions about upgrading hard drives and adding storage to a PC are among the most common in the Windows XP user groups, newsgroups, chats and other online community forums.
The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of the current state of hard drive technology, explain how your hard drive impacts digital video editing with Windows Movie Maker 2, and give you pointers for smart decisions about upgrading your hard drive. This isn't intended to be a tutorial on Windows Movie Maker 2, but I'll make references to how different elements will impact your use of this software.
Windows Movie Maker 2 is an upgrade to the video editing accessory that comes with Windows XP. Check Windows Movie Maker 2 Download for system requirements and the free download. For more information about using Movie Maker 2, see two Expert Zone columns, Moviemaking 101 and Moviemaking 202, and Focus On: Windows Movie Maker. To learn more about working with digital video, read my book, Faster Smarter Digital Video (Microsoft Press, 2002).
Hard Drives on Today's Computers
Most computers today are shipping with 30 to 80 GB (and bigger) hard drives. Although spacious for most tasks, these drives can quickly become full when digital video enters the picture. Why? Well, think of it like this: every frame of video is like a JPEG photo you might get off your digital camera. There are usually 30 frames per second of video on a computer, so if you have a 5-minute video, that's like having 9000 JPEG photos on your hard drive! An hour of DV quality video will take up around 13 GB, and that's just for the capturing—you'll need that much space again if you're going to be outputting a final project without editing too much of the video out. So, for an hour of video you'll need 26 GB minimum. But hard drives are about more than just size, so we'll also delve into why performance is important.
Figure 1: What the inside of a hard drive looks like (photo courtesy of
Western Digital
)
Although the Windows Media Video (WMV) format offers amazing compression that allows you to store long videos in a surprisingly small amount of space, you'll use WMV at the end of your project, not at the beginning, so it's important to have adequate space to edit your video in the first stages.
Will Capturing in Lower Resolution Help?
Video-editing software will often have options to minimize the storage space used. The most common option is capturing a low-quality version of the video. This lets you work with and edit that video, and then during the final step, the software recaptures the relevant segments in high-resolution. The theory is that you'll edit out a lot of the video you don't need, and thus you save space by only doing high-quality captures of what you do need.
This method is workable, but ultimately not all video-editing software packages support it, and it usually requires you to leave your camera on for the duration of the process (which requires a long-life battery or yet another power cable). Another method is to capture the video in MPEG format, but this takes extra time and results in lower overall quality. I prefer to capture the video in full resolution and put the camera away—this takes more storage space, but I find it's less hassle.
Windows Movie Maker 2 allows you to capture video in a variety of formats and resolutions. But take it from me: there's nothing worse than capturing and editing your video in low resolution thinking it's only for the Web, then deciding later that video would have made a good high-quality DVD.
It's easy to go from high-quality video down to low-quality video, but almost impossible to go the other way. Create your projects at maximum quality and resolution, then scale back later.
Where to Store Your Digital Video
So now that we've talked about how much storage space digital video takes up, the next question becomes: "So where do I put all this video while I'm working with it?"
A lot of different storage options are on the market today, from hard drives to DVD burners to Iomega Zip drives. To read my full take on what's out there, check out Chapter 5 of Faster Smarter Digital Video The bottom line is that when it comes to digital video, no form of storage can replace the modern hard drive.
Hard drives are the only real choice for a digital video workspace. The newest drives are fast, spacious, and the chance of data loss is very minimal. With capacities currently hitting 250 GB in a single drive, hard drives also represent the best cost per megabyte value and overall performance. And there's no sign of hard drive growth stopping — later this year Maxtor will be releasing a 320 GB drive!
Factors to Look for in a Hard Drive
When buying a hard drive, there are three important factors to consider: capacity, rotation speed, and cache. All these elements play a role in how fast you can open, edit, and save your digital video with Windows Movie Maker 2.
| • | Capacity is straightforward—the higher the number, the more storage space you have. I should mention here that you'll never get the full amount of space promised on the box. The reason is boring and technical, but as a rule of thumb, for every 100 GB your hard drive says it has, you'll get 93 GB of usable space. |
| • | Rotation speed—the number of times that a hard drive spins around per minute (much like a tire on a car): 5400 revolutions per minute (RPM) is standard, and 7200 RPM is what you'll see on high-performance drives consumer drives. On servers the drives can spin as fast as 15,000 RPM, but those drives are very expensive. For video work, and indeed for a faster performing computer in general, 7200 RPM is the best choice. That's not to say that if you have a 5400 RPM hard drive you can't work with digital video, but if you're buying a new hard drive I strongly recommend a 7200 RPM drive. Once you start opening and saving gigabytes of data, you'll appreciate the extra speed boost. |
| • | Cache size—cache on a hard drive is much like RAM on your computer. The cache acts as a temporary storage location for the data, and since the cache can respond much more quickly than the hard drive itself (nanoseconds instead of milliseconds), the more cache a drive has the better overall performance it will give. Most hard drives have 2 or 4 MB of cache—the Special Edition Western Digital drives and Matrox DiamondMax Plus 9 both have 8 MB of cache, which makes them top performers. I only buy drives with 8 MB of cache for this reason. |
There's another class of hard drive called a "SCSI drive" (pronounced "skuzzy") that you might hear mentioned when looking for a new hard drive. SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) hard drives offer some performance advantages over most standard hard drives, but SCSI hard drives are vastly more expensive, offer less storage space for your money, and require special know-how to configure on a PC. SCSI drives are very popular in the server world and high-end workstations, but for you and me, they're too expensive and too complex. And the good news is, a high-speed SCSI drive benchmarks roughly the same as a modern high-end consumer drive, so there's no reason to take on the expense of a SCSI drive.
What about Serial ATA?
One of the new standards for hard drives is called Serial ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment). It's been in development for several years, but the first drives are just starting to ship with it, including ones from Seagate Technology. Several brands of hard drives on the market support Serial ATA, and support for it was added to Windows XP with Service Pack 1. Serial ATA is definitely the standard of the future — the drives using Serial ATA will be able to handle up to 144 petabytes. How big is that? 1000 GB equals 1 terabyte, and 1024 terabytes equals 1 petabyte. 144 petabytes is a staggering amount of information, and I think that the concept of magnetic-based hard drives will be obsolete before we reach that barrier anyway!
At this moment in time, if your computer supports Serial ATA, it's a good way to go — although the performance benchmarks currently don't show Serial ATA as offering many improvements, future drives will certainly offer massive speed improvements over current hard drives. If your computer doesn't support Serial ATA, don't worry about it — odds are, the next computer you buy will have Serial ATA support.
External Hard Drives
Easier to install than an internal hard drive and more than fast enough for video work, external hard drives are one of the best investments you can make in preparing your computer for working with Windows Movie Maker 2. I didn't use one until recently, and I didn't realize what I was missing — the ability to move a hard drive full of data between computers is very convenient, and with capacities currently reaching 250 GB, they're large enough for any task.
They generally come in two flavors: USB 2.0 and FireWire (IEEE 1394). External hard drives are available from a variety of vendors. A few of the more popular ones include:
Figure 2: The Western Digital Combo Special Edition hard drive
| • | Maxtor Personal Storage 5000XT: Offering a powerful one-touch backup button, this drive boasts 250 GB worth of storage and access via USB 2.0 and FireWire. |
| • | Western Digital Combo Special Edition: This innovative 250 GB drive has both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections on it, making it compatible with a huge number of PCs, and has a flashy design that lights up (see figure 2). |
| • | Iogear Ion: The Ion series from Iogear is offered in capacities ranging from 40 GB to 120 GB. Boasting USB 2.0 support and a slick design, the Ion would look good on any desk. |
| • | Iomega HDD: Iomega, a long-time player in the storage industry, has a line of USB 2.0 and FireWire hard drives ranging in size from 20 GB to 120 GB. |
There are also much smaller external drives that use the smaller 2.5 inch hard drives used in laptops. These drives take up less space than the external drives I mentioned above, but they lack the performance that full 3.5 inch desktop hard drives offer. The 2.5 inch external drives are still fast enough to capture and save Windows Media Video to, but I'd only recommend them if you're planning on doing a lot of travelling with the drives and need to pack something small.
Hard Drive Partitions
Having a big and fast hard drive is only half of the equation—knowing how to use it intelligently as part of your workflow process is the other half. Why does it matter? Well, when you're working with video in Movie Maker 2 (capturing, editing, or rendering) your computer can work faster if it can load and unload segments of the video directly to and from the hard drive without having to work around other files. When you have a partition specifically for video work, with nothing else on it, you'll see performance gains over doing video editing on your main Windows partition (which is full of files).
So how do you create these partitions? There are two ways: the free but slightly complex way or with software that you purchase. PartitionMagic is software created by PowerQuest Corporation, and it allows you to move, delete, expand, shrink, or add partitions on the fly from within Windows. The software is very impressive, and it makes working with partitions a breeze. I also like that PartitionMagic creates boot disks, allowing me to format and partition hard drives on computers that don't have Windows on them yet.
This software is extremely useful to have in your toolkit, but it's not absolutely necessary for getting a new hard drive set up—Windows XP has some tools that will allow you to do some basic partition functions. The complete walkthough is found in Chapter 5 of Faster Smarter Digital Video, but if you're up for a little exploring on your own in Windows XP:
1. | Click Start, click Run, and at the prompt type compmgmt.msc. The Computer Management Console opens. |
2. | In the console tree, click Disk Management, and you'll have access to the tools you need, as shown in Figure 3.  Figure 3: The Disk Management tool inside the Computer Management Console |
Putting it All Together
I hope this article has been helpful in giving you a basic overview of how your hard drive has an impact on working with digital video. If you have an older computer with a small hard drive, there's no better way to breathe new life into it than getting a new hard drive — hard drive technology and speed has improved quite a bit in the past several years. If you have a newer computer but lack the space needed for digital video editing with Windows Movie Maker 2, an external drive is a great option. As long as your computer has the required ports (USB 2.0 or FireWire), external drives are a fast and easy way to add on the space you need for digital video. Enjoy creating your video projects!
Jason Dunn is an avid digital media enthusiast who also writes about mobile technology. He's the author of several books, including PhotoImpact 7 Power, Short Order Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000, and Faster Smarter Digital Video. Jason also runs Kensai, which focuses on helping companies successfully navigate the online world.
