Dan LaValley Manager Biology New Media Center

Thanks to Dan LaValley of Learning Technology & Distance Education for creating this tutorial.

Digital media uses a fair amount of hard drive space. Five minutes of DV format video takes up about 1 gigabyte (GB) of hard drive space. About one hour and 40 minutes of CD quality audio fits in the same amount of space! The issue of hard drive space management is important especially for larger projects. As newer high definition formats come into more common use - HDTV, DVD audio, etc. - it is certain that hard drive space will continue to be an issue. For that reason, its a good idea to understand the basic properties of digital media so you can make choices appropriate to your project when capturing and editing your projects. More about digital audio properties can be found in our Sound Forge tutorial, and more about digital video properties are in Apple's iMovie tutorials.

Because digital media takes up so much space, codecs (compression / decompression algorithms) are often used to compress the media into much smaller files. The basic rule to keep in mind is that the cleaner and better looking and sounding your media is from the outset, the better your results will look and sound after encode to CD, DVD or the Internet. More details on compression and encoders are in the Streaming Video section.

 

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