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How much memory does a digital video take on your computer?

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One of the reasons why digital videos have such an appeal is because of the versatility that they offer.A digital video can be recorded and uploaded to an internet site to be ready for viewing in a manner of minutes.There is also a great deal of appeal in the fact that digital video can be edited and stored right on your home computer.However, there are a lot of downsides to your computer and your ability to fully take advantage of your digital video editing and viewing capabilities.Many people do not have computers with memories that can handle storing a digital video, let alone manipulate it quickly for editing.

Most computers today are being sold with an average of 30 to 80 GB hard drives.This amount of space is suitable for most tasks done on the computer but consider how much information digital video really contains and how much information really needs to be stored.Digital videos usually record at about 30 frames per second.Since each frame is a picture you can translate that into storing 30 pictures per second on your computer.For a simple 5 minute film, you will be putting at least the equivalent of 9000 JPEG photos on your hard drive.That's a lot of space if you stop to think about it.Taking this illustration a step further, just think of how much space an hour of digital video would take up.It takes about 13GB just to store the video in memory.If you want to actually edit the film and start manipulating the file, you will need even more memory than that.Some estimate that it is even twice that amount of space, or 26 GB, to actually edit an hour long video.It is possible to edit with less memory but the less memory space you have the longer it will take your system to retrieve bits of information and your editing process can take quite some time.

Looking at the actual size of the digital video from a different perspective we can see another reason why the file size of a digital video is so large.If you break down the video into pixels (a pixel takes up 3 bytes of space) and multiply that by an average resolution at 30 frames per second you will end up with as much as 1.6 gigabytes of storage space needed for a minute of digital video. Some would argue that you can simply compress the file to make its size more manageable.This is a good solution for long tern storage but not for a video that you intend on editing as the time to retrieve specific bits of information is likely to take just as long to have to search through all of the existing data.

So what can digital video enthusiasts do to solve their problems with memory space?The best suggestion is to be sure that you have enough memory space to begin with.Experts recommend that for video editing and individual should have a processor that is running at least at 600MHz and there should be at least 256MB to 384MB of memory.This is not to say that you cannot edit digital video unless your hard drive meets these specifications but you can expect delay as your computer will have to work harder to search for and retrieve information.
For content creation such as editing home videos, photo manipulation, downloading and manipulating audio files it is suggested that you have upwards of 384MB to 512MB of memory and a hard drive with at least 20 gigabytes of space if your system is running at 600MHz or slower.Remember that many people do nothing to change the storage size on their computers after they buy and start to use a digital camera.They just realize that editing such large amounts of information will take some time and they are willing to deal with the potential frustration that that situation presents.

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