any suggestions

Yea, I am doing the same thing, but with a slightly larger Budget.. lol

1 - A Raid, you need a raid for HD data, 2 TB is nothing for HD footage, ESPECIALLY if you want to master to Blu Ray and HD DVD.

2 - A Blu/Ray Drive, and you cant author to HD DVD yet, no burners out yet.

That is all I can think of, I just need more information from you for more details.

I might be 18 **(just turned 19 April 4th)**, but watch out, everyone has to start somewhere. I'm just starting a bit faster and bigger. 🙂

I have been looking at a few blu-ray burners but as far as finished product goes I will be going to a DVD replicator for all of my authoring needs (as well as my CSS/Macrovision encoding) since the discs are being produced for sale.

I have been looking at some raid set ups lately....since working with HD is a new concept to me how much space do you think I will need?

What kind of a budget are you working with and what kind of system are you looking to create? What are your specs and what will it be used for primarily?

For HD space, and indication, the film King Kong (Peter Jackson's) scanned the film at 2K resolution for editing. This is far greater than the 1080p/i images they used 3TB for the entire footage (princple photography) Since 2K is about 3-4 times bigger than 1080 it is safe to assume that 1.5 Tb would be enough to capture all of the data. But depending on what you are doing with it then you will need more disk space. but bare in mind this is 2K images with no sound.

Most editing studios will have seperate systems to store the data on for each of the phases. The editing will have then own space. Then when they want the edited footage to go for rotoscoping then they will export it in the highest res they can, as send it to the rotoscopers. Then they will provide their product to the compositors and they will merge it with any visual effects footage they have. These would all have the own systems.

I am setting up a HD edit suite for my own films however I too have 1.5TB inside the box I can put a lot more in if I need it. And that is advisable. As HDD become cheaper, when they release 1TB drives that are cheap I can take out the 6 250GB drives and swap them with 500Gb or 750GB and suddenly for a small investment I have doubled or tripled my capacity. Then I can by an External sata case for my other drives and hook them in using e-STA if needed for more.

Make sure that you have flexibility when selecting your drive sizes, can you swap them out or do you need to go to apple and do it, or can you buy any drive and put in the system. HDD will only get bigger, faster and cheaper so make sure you are able to upgrade with the least amount of fuss.

I hope this helps.

Michael Rogers
McRogson

yeah that def helps..thanks

Since my films are going to be digital/to digital I will not need to have it rotoscoped (which I am assuming has to do with actual film) I may purchase a few terabyte externals and software raid them together.. I can add "Apple Certified" internal drives but I can use any USB2.0 or Firewire Drive that is available.

I had some people on another board tell me I would need like 20+ TB of space if my movie was going to be 2 1/2-3hrs long in 1080p....and that pretty much blew my budget out of the water since I need mixers for multiple audio tracks for the Dolby/DTS mastering.

Any suggestions on audio hardware? Also..any suggestions on what I should do during the actual filming for optimum use of the Dolby/DTS streams?