Storage space used by Vocational / PE

[Alastairb25]

Hi All,

 

We have found lately our PE department and other areas under Vocation as a whole are using ever increasing storage for videos.

 

We have asked for spec on this, ie Number of Students 8 Number of Videos * Length, Quality, Retention time and so forth

 

For us this could easily add up to a couple of terabytes on its own, which is beyond our current capacity.

 

We may well look down the SAN route versus DAS and Storage Spaces depending on what comes back from Teachers.

 

What do other Schools do regarding Storage requirements in relation to videos being used as coursework and evidence for moderation?

 

TIA

Alastair

[Tones]

I find the Arts and PE facultys dept take a lot of storage. Now we're on Google Workspace it's not a problem as they have shared drives dedicated to this. I think you'll find it difficult trying to regulate file types and sizes as a lot of videos are taken by the students at clubs outside of school for PE. And typically the students who take that subject isn't going to be as technical.

 

It you're deadset against fixing them down I think take a look at the spec of submission and go from that. Probably is 720p MP4. Then get equipment that can be loaned out that's preset up.

[CHiLL]

I had to go through our storage a while ago and convert a lot of video. For easiness sake, we use iPads or the odd old video camera to record, but the default file format, especially for the latter is not efficient. I ended up using WizTree to locate all the .MOV iPad files and .MTS video camera files and using handbrake to convert them into a H265 MP4. My PC has an Intel Arc A380 and I had best performance from the H265 Intel QSV preset. I also set the destination location to be the same as the source location, so the new file would end up in the same place. However, it was a time consuming process because I had to do a quick check with each file that the conversion had worked before deleting the original video. On average, I had file sizes that were some 15-25% of the original .MOV files and about 10% of the original .MTS files, saving about 400GB on our storage server.

 

We are starting to move a lot to SharePoint for storage and as long as they copy them onto there, I don't really mind the file sizes - it's only an issue if we break 40TB+ on our SharePoint/M365 local backup...which given we're on <10TB for absolutely everything up until now, I think we should be fine.

Edited February 5, 2024 by CHiLL

[3s-gtech]

I built another DFS share just for student evidence. It's capped at 1TB, because that's the size of the volume, but at least it's independent of other storage.

 

You'll find you can archive last year's evidence off pretty soon after the exam window, post appeals process.

[mavhc]

Halve the space with https://github.com/mavhc/shrink-video-recursive-python/

[msi_school]

I created separate shares for these departments and set a storage quota, to prevent them from bringing everyone to a half when they fill the drive.

 

However this did not resolve the size or retention questions. Generally I founds the best answer was to tell SLT XYZ department want more space and it will cost £ABC or they can delete some work and let it work itself out.

 

The best answer for me was to move to the cloud but with Google and Microsoft setting storage limits this might not be so good going forwards.