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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I think people mis-estimate file sizes these days - two hours of completely uncompressed 4K video is under 5 TB. Fits on a basic consumer external hard drive no problem. Send it by mail.

https://toolstud.io/video/filesize.php?width=3840&height=216...

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Well, two hard drives in RAID-0 if you want to play it back in real-time without copying it first to faster storage, because a single SATA drive cannot sustain 597.2MB/sec. Unless your definition of "basic consumer external hard drive" is an NVMe SSD over 10Gbps USB 3.2 or better.

As the thread says - it’s compressed. I’m giving uncompressed sizes as an upper bound.

The GP is pointing out that storing an uncompressed film isn't useful if it can't be played back. Playing back an uncompressed 4K film is nearly 600MBps. That's a data rate you're not going to get out of any consumer HDDs.

But they're not uncompressed. They're compressed. You don't need to play them back uncompressed. You can even compress them losslessly.

I probably wouldn't call it "basic", but aside from that, https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-Thunderbolt-External-S... seems to fit the bill fine.

How common is 4K at 24fps though? I'd expect 4K to usually use higher framerates than that.

24fps is still standard for movies, in part because people have associated higher framerate video with amateur home video recordings so it looks cheap. :)

To elaborate on this, higher frame rate video registers the same way to people who aren’t aware that’s what they’re noticing. I was discussing this with my dad just a little over a week ago, where he noted some portion of a movie looked lower production than the rest of the movie. I had noticed it too, because it was visibly higher frame rate. Lower frame rates more closely match the visuals of film, and higher frame rates more closely match the production of daytime TV like judge shows and “soap operas”, and that’s what they visually evoke.

Thankfully this changes with latest generation brought up on 60fps YT and Twitch.

> I'd expect 4K to usually use higher framerates than that.

They tried higher frame rates with for example the Hobbit, remember, and lots of people didn't like it for some silly reason.

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