Apple Final Cut Pro 6 - Manual (Page 209)

208 Part III Setting Up Your Editing System
Data Rates and Storage Devices
The data rate of the video you capture depends on the format of the source video and
the codec you use for capture. If you are capturing low data rate video, chances are you
can use more inexpensive storage devices. If you need to capture extremely high data
rate video, you may need a faster hard disk. Here are some examples of data rates for
common capture formats:
Whatever disk drive technology you decide to use, your storage disk’s sustained
transfer speed must be fast enough to keep up with the data rate. Depending on the
data rate of the video you’re capturing, a single drive may or may not be enough.
For example, if you plan to capture uncompressed SD video at 24 megabytes per
second (MB/sec.), it’s unlikely that a single hard disk will be able to record the data fast
enough. Even if you somehow successfully get the data on disk, Final Cut Pro may drop
frames during playback or output.
Format Typical data rate
OfflineRT (using Photo JPEG) Varies between 300 and 500 KB/sec.
25:1 Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) 1 MB/sec.
DV (25)
HDV (1080i) 3.6 MB/sec.
DVCPRO 50 7.2 MB/sec.
DVCPRO HD (1080i60)
DVCPRO HD 720p60) 11.75 MB/sec.
DVCPRO HD (720p24) 5 MB/sec.
2:1 Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) 12 MB/sec.
Uncompressed SD video 24 MB/sec.
Uncompressed 8-bit
1080 29.97i HD video 121.5 MB/sec.
Uncompressed 10-bit
1080 29.97i HD video 182.3 MB/sec.