How many MB is a 60 minutes MiniDV cassette?

Question

I need to know how many megabytes can a 60 MIN MiniDV cassette hold. It isn't written on the package, it is only written that is can hold up to 60 minutes of recording.

I need to transfer recorded video from the cassette to the computer and as I don't have the port for the DV cable at my notebook , I need to know how big will the recording be.

Thanks for answers. :)

Answer 1

DV and HDV both use a fixed data rate of 25 Mbps. That works out to 187 MBytes per minute, or 11,250 MBytes on a one hour recording. The bit rate and the resolution are not adjustable on the miniDV system. However the computer captures the stream and puts it into an AVI file container which adds overhead to the total storage. I would allow 12G at least for an SD file.

Answer 2

You did not specify whther this video is DV or HDV...

60 minutes of standard definition video (DV) will use  about 13-14 gig of hard drive space.

60 minutes of high definition video (HDV) will use about 44 gig of hard drive space.

Using a laptop's internal hard drive is typically not recommended for two reasons:

1) Laptop internal hard drives are generally not very large... NEVER have less than 10% of the total drive as available space... The operating system needs available space for virtual memory.

2) Laptop internal drives generally spin at 5,400 rpm. External 3 1/2 drives (or drives made for towe/desktop machines) typically spin at 7,200 rpm (and have a bigger buffer) so they can better handle the video import process. There are external drives that spin at 10,000 rpm and have bigger buffers, but for home use, the 7,200 rpm drives are fine.

Presuming your laptop has an available PCMCIA slot,

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and you will need

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Answer 3

lare's answer is mostly correct.  DV and HDV use the same amount of space, which is 25mbps for video, but he forgot about audio which adds about 1.5mbps.  The total hard disk space needed to capture a 62 minute miniDV tape (either DV or HDV) is just shy of 13GB, as long as you capture in native format.  (Some editing programs transcode HDV into a different codec for easier processing but which takes more disk space, this is probably what Nu'uanu was referring to.)