Trailer for my upcoming Battlefield 3 montage.

[RainMotorsports]

Battlefield 3 passed the 1 year mark October 25th just after the 10 year anniversary of the Battlefield series. I put off my originally planned Montage to include an extra month and game expansion and mark the 1st anniversary. Its taken longer than expected as I had hoped to have it done by the 31st. But its in the stages of final tweaking and almost here!

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/I05wwhaKCE4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Don't forget to view in HD

 

[Rob Williams]

Damn, man! I'm not a big BF fan, but I'm sure as hell intrigued to see the full video! The production value here is amazing.

I have to admit, I'm in relative awe that you recorded over 100 hours in the past year of the game. I doubt you still have all of the source given its size, but do you have an estimate of how much disk space that 100 hours would take up?

 

[RainMotorsports]

Not bad for an amateur in a hurry eh? I only have 337 hours in the game and I've recorded 75 percent but no word on how much footage survived the cuts at the end of each night. I do have full 40 or so minute rounds recorded.

Raw footage 1080p 60 frames per second weighs in at 4gb per minute. Each night the record drive is emptied the footage cut and encoded. I encode footage in h.264 60 fps 50mbps but full rounds get the 30 fps 28 Mbps treatment to save space. I keep the 60 fps clips to help with slomos and stuff. The bit rates are semi fixed in Sony Movie Studio 12 I used to use 30 and 60 respectively I feel at 60 fps detail takes a big dive lower than 40.

100 hours of 50 Mbps by my math is about 2TB? That's the size of the drive dedicated to holding masters. Raw footage is used sometimes and I burn the projects off to DL DVDs when I'm done saving only the encoded versions on the PC. I sorted the majority of my video a month ago. 2 weeks ago I sorted it again selecting 200 videos totaling about 3 hours of footage as potentials for the Montage. 10 minute montage = pain in the ass to decide.

 

[RainMotorsports]

Here I will show you what my storage looks like at the moment.

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System was slated to have 12 TB of total storage, Flood hit those hdd factories and that was all over with. So I had to make do with that I had. Just recently acquired the 1 TB primary. Record Array is 2 320GB 7200rpm laptop drives in raid 0 which synthetic benches on par with the 1 TB 7200 at around 160 read 130 write sequential, as long as I keep it emptied it works awesomely. Backup drive is a 1TB salvaged from a dead 1TB external. Temp storage is the laptop hard drive that was in my PS3 and previously in a laptop.

The folder for the Montage is at 87 GB right now it will slim up by the time its done. Too much of a pain to find the videos that were not used. When a project is done I save it and check the box to have it copy the media into a folder and then I delete the original folder.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Don't bother with DVD backups, waste of money really and for such little storage and a huge time-sink to burn each of them, label, etc. Sticking to large HDD is the better bet - but as you have noticed, you have to keep them balanced to prevent overflow. To get around this, you can use a form of RAID called JBOD - or "Just a Bunch Of Disks", this sequentially writes from one hard drive to the next. When one hard drive is full, it will write to the second, then third, fourth, etc. If you lose a hard drive, you only lose the data on that drive. Since movies are written sequential, if they become truncated (cut-off), you can still read the first part of the movie by modifying the header (or some players are smart enough to detect this and plays anyway). This means you don't need to keep juggling data around and keep it all on a single volume. Each disk drive doesn't need to be the same size either, you can mix any drive size you want.

JBOD can be done with hardware or software, either with Intel's RAID software, your motherboard RAID controller, or via Windows using disk management and using 'span multiple drives'. Just to be clear, JBOD doesn't offer any performance boosts, it just allows sequential data to span multiple drives and should only be used as such - not as a backup.

 

[RainMotorsports]

Don't bother with DVD backups, waste of money really and for such little storage and a huge time-sink to burn each of them, label, etc.

Problem is I am out of SATA ports already and my minimum wage ass has 20 spindles of discs and no money. I literally have DL DVD's from back before Bluray was a thing. I havent bought discs in 5 years but I used to buy them every time they went on sale lol.

i think people can use some time management I always try to do 2 things at once or do them when I'm stuck elsewhere.. Reinstalling windows and all your apps? Actual time involved is about 30 minutes even from scratch. How? Do it while your at work . The project backups? I start the disc and go to work come home put it in the case and go to bed. Thats just me. Encoding 2 hours of footage without GPU acceleration? Go see a movie damn it lol. I did my last OS reinstall using my cell phone while taking orders at work lol.

Don't worry I balance it out by sleeping for 16 hours lmao. Sleep is my drug of choice.

Assuming 0 failures my next hdd purchase will be a 256 GB SSD next year actually reducing my capacity. 2 Years I will buy a new GPU and in 4 years I will be replacing the whole PC. No other drive purchases scheduled. But plenty of money being spent elsewhere like my vehicle.

At some point I will likely just delete all of this footage. But actually hoping when you can get 64 GB usb drives for 10 bucks I will only need about 2 of those to hold whats important and while overall its not a great price per GB in the short term its an easy fix.