I want to copy Wedding footage onto disk without loss of quality. Whats the best product on the market? and what's the maximum time you can save. I have a Tiny 500mhz with 13gb. I'm thinking about buying a 2nd hard drive solely for Wedding footage.
Is there anyone who could help, as I'm not computer literate.
It depends on how you're going to capture it to disk.
If your footage is from a DV camcorder, then you will need 3.6MBytes per second of tape. Beware of the 2 GByte limit on video files in Windows, that means a capture from DV can't exceed 9 minutes and some seconds.
If your footage is from an analogue camcorder, the storage needed depends on the compression ratio, and you set that yourself.
Hard drives are getting pretrty cheap these days, even for the big fast ones needed for video. I have an IBM 25G drive for video, which will hold over 90 minutes of DV footage, and costs a little over £200 if you shop around. You don't need super fast drives, almost any EIDE drive (ATA33 or 66) will do, and the spin speed needn't be high either, the IBM goes at 5400rpm, runs cools and quiet, and can handel data at about 19MBytes/second (6 times faster than DV video footage).
Hope that helps.
Worth pointing out that some DV cards can get around the 2GB limit directly, the key example being Canopus DVRaptor. And most can do it indirectly, by means of batch capture - you just make sure that none of the clips in the list that you tell the computer to capture is longer than 9 mins 23 secs. Once they're on the time line, the join between clips is seamless.
Bob C