How much storage space does an average LTT project take?

SergeyB · April 22, 2020

Hi everyone!

I'm building myself a storage/transcoding server to be able to edit 4K videos from on my LAN and I'm trying to come up with a smarter and efficient (maybe automated) system for ingest and real-time scrubbing in Premiere.

In my case, I'm the only editor producing my videos although I use 2 computers (desktop and laptop) and my LAN is 1Gbit.
My footage comes from sources like GoPro camera, 4K drone and screen recordings and I'm trying to.

So I was studying Linus's videos to see how they setup their hardware and software, even though their operation is obviously much more complex than mine.
I realize that for LTT, they edit the videos in 1080p Cineform (or was that upgraded? lol) which of course allows to utilize less CPU, but more storage space and network bandwidth, not to mention the fact that faster storage is necessary <- not my case.

So my question is how much storage does an average LTT project take?

Thanks for your help!
Big fan of LTT
-Sergey.

Jarsky · April 22, 2020

You probably need @LinusTech or one of his crew to answer this.

But I believe its approx 80GB for an average LTT project....much less for a Tech Quickie since theyre filmed in close to a single take, and probably considerably more for a special like ScrapYard Wars....You would also need to account for the space for any extra B-Roll footage you might have

They also store the finished project as well.

Probably what you need to consider is how many minutes your average shoot is, and your finished videos.

4K RAW is approx ~350MB/minute

4K HEVC (H.264) is approx 120MB/minute....and less for H.265 which is even better for 4K as it supports HDR and 10-bit+ color.

minibois · April 22, 2020

9 hours ago, SergeyB said:

So my question is how much storage does an average LTT project take?

I would imagine that will depend on what kind of project this is, but just to give an idea: a 10 minute clip would be around 50GB on their RED cameras at 20:1 compression ratio.

That's 5GB a minute, or 84MB per second.

Source (timestamp at 2:55):

9 hours ago, SergeyB said:

I realize that for LTT, they edit the videos in 1080p Cineform (or was that upgraded? lol) which of course allows to utilize less CPU, but more storage space and network bandwidth, not to mention the fact that faster storage is necessary <- not my case.

As per this video:

It seems like for editing they still use Cineform, namely 'Cineform Raw', which - according to that same quote - use up '50 to 70GB'.

Seeing as most LTT videos are between 7 and 12 minutes, that '10 min = 50GB' statement still seems quite valid.

EDIT: Oh I forgot to mention the obvious! A video of course is not just 10 minutes of footage, it's much more.

Just to give an idea, Linus did a POV PC Build, which is 40 minutes in length. So you can imagine the other build guides are also around that length to film and are just cut up into pieces, which makes it a 10-15 minute video in reality.

But that is still is 40 minute of footage! Or is it.. They often during filming, they cut because they realize some things are just not that interesting to show...