KS4/5 Media Studies - Storage

[keefb]

We are running GCSE & A Level Media Studies courses. I am being told by the meeja studies teachers that they need to capture & store uncompressed video at about 200MB/min & that they need students to be able to store up to an hour's-worth, which is about 12GB/student. We have 40 doing meeja studies this year with double that number proposed for 2008/9. I make that getting on for 1TB without even considering backup. They say they need uncompressed video for editing in Premiere Elements. I have already set up a separate subnet with the server & 25 workstations with 1Gb/s to the desktop, but the storage requirements are going to be a killer.

What are others doing?

[dhicks]

I am being told by the meeja studies teachers that they need to capture & store uncompressed video at about 200MB/min & that they need students to be able to store up to an hour's-worth, which is about 12GB/student. We have 40 doing meeja studies this year with double that number proposed for 2008/9. I make that getting on for 1TB without even considering backup. They say they need uncompressed video for editing in Premiere Elements. I have already set up a separate subnet with the server & 25 workstations with 1Gb/s to the desktop, but the storage requirements are going to be a killer.

12GB/hour is standard DV video, sounds like they'll be capturing video on MiniDV cameras (via firewire?). 1TB of storage is easy enough these days, it's just two harddrives (3 for RAID). Unless you have a really fast server, though, the pupils will be needing to use local storage for the actual editing. Maybe a setup where students can have their own directory (that only they have permissions to write to, of course) on a local machine which is then backed up overnight to the server?

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David Hicks