video storage

[gustavolacerda]

I've given up on compressing my videos. Most compression software doesn't compress batches of files, and those that do usually lose meta-data, like datetime. It also requires a ton of processing, which is slow and heats up my computer (this incidentally explains why my Canon digicams keep them in bulky formats, AVI or MOV: they are not nearly

Comments

[ledflyd]

I use handbrake for video processing (based on Oliver's recommendation, actually), which does support batch processing. But you're right about overheating. I had this problem even converting videos to smaller, tablet format. Anyway, is using a cloud service a cheap option these days, for either storage or to 'outsource' your video compression?

[gustavolacerda]

I was thinking about that... ideally, the cloud would do both: compress and store the compressed videos. YouTube does this for free, but I don't know how far it scales.

In any case, this would require me to get a longer cable, so that my connection is wire-ful.

[olifhar]

Look what was first in the search results:

http://www.reelseo.com/cloud-based-video-encoding-tools/

GCE and EC2 are cheaper than I thought they would be, even with network transfer fees. (In-data transfer is free for Amazon EC2.)

If it takes 80 sec to encode 180 sec of HD video to h264, based on the EC2 rates...

8/13*0.66 = $0.40

So 40 cents for processing an hour of video on EC2. 80/180 is kind of a high end estimate (those are MacBook Pro Core i7 Benchmarks) and it might actually be a lot better with the 8-core options.

Storage is what might drive up the costs substantially. $0.10 per GB per month on EC2, which is cheaper than Google Cloud Storage. So 750GB is $75 per month, the price of some unlimited mobile data plans.

Still an interesting concept.

[gustavolacerda]

Cool! Thanks!
I currently have way less than 750GB of videos... it's more like 100GB. And that's because they're largely uncompressed. I think we could comfortably bring it down to 30GB, if the cloud will compress it for me. So storage would cost ~$3 / month for the current amount of videos. I probably have less than 30 hours total, making the compression cost a mere $12.

The painful part is uploading the 100GB.

P.S. I don't wanna have to deal with latency, when accessing the videos. But this may be useful as a backup.

[gustavolacerda]

Thunderbolt is still too expensive, so I'm looking at FireWire 800.

Iomega 2TB MiniMax Hard Drive FireWire 800: $190
Iomega 2TB MiniMax Hard Drive FireWire 800: $158
Seagate Backup Plus for Mac 2TB Desktop FireWire 800 / USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (Black) $150
Seagate 2TB GoFlex Desktop Hard Drive for Mac
LaCie 2TB d2 Quadra with USB 3.0 External Hard Drive - Refurbished (301543U-R)

Some of these may require external power, which is a minus.

watch this space

[bhudson]

If its for backup you don't need much speed, which can save you some cash.

[peamasii]

I wouldn't go for firewire, it's overkill (unless I'm doing live captures where latency is critical).
My preference for external storage, if price is not the first concern, would be a networked RAID rack with multiple drives. Something like this:

http://www.bol.com/nl/p/cloudstation-duo-4-0tb-2x-2-0tb-hdd-raid-0-1/1003004012161619/

If price is a higher concern, then a simple USB 2.0 external drive is sufficient for backups, playing DVD-quality video, can be shared over the LAN and it's very cheap. USB 2.0 has a max bitrate of 100 Mb/sec and DVD playback only requires 11 Mb/sec without additional compression.

[peamasii]

I do both: compression with divx and external storage on 2x1 TB Freecom drives. I use a Canon camera for videos (Powershot SXIS) and the HD films are horribly large before compression. My computer can't even play them properly because the bitrate is out of this world. I compress them overnight in a batch using DivX Plus Converter (I think it costs about $30, but it's very nice because you can export to many different formats and sizes). I think the filesizes are reduced by 10-20x factor and the quality stays very high.