Nothing consumes hard disk space quite like timelapse photography and other kinds of video/film-files. For example, if you're shooting 50 GB a day – and that's not even a lot, in my wiev – you produce 1 TB in just three weeks of effective shooting. As a result of this fact, a problem presents itself sooner rather than later: You will eventually run out of hard disk space.

My question is: How do you solve that problem? Here's a few possible solutions that I've thought out for myself:

• Keep buying bigger/more harddrives
  
• Transfer the files to disks/tapes for long term storage
  
• Convert all edited files to lossy formats (God forbid)
  
• Produce a high quality video clip and delete the original files (God forbid even more...)
  

We all have to face this problem at some point. What do you do to solve it?

I recommend converting to the lossy DNG format provided in the newer Lightroom Versions. This will preserve 12bit editability of your RAWs but significantly reduce size.

Yes, I thought aboiut that too. I have actually never tried DNG. I understood that it is smaller than original RAW-files, but i thought it was only slightly smaller, so I never bothered to chech it out. Thanks for the tip!

You must differentiate: normally DNG ist not lossy and only slightly smaller. But with LR4 Adobe introduced a lossy compression for DNG that preserves the RAW-features but shrinks files significantly.

He he, okay, thanks again for clearing that up!

What about yourself? I suppose you have a big RAID to store your files in.?

Just a thing about that lossy compression. It's really smaller but, hey, its "lossy". this means that is like the jpg, so you lost forever some datas
probably is better to but another hard disk i have 3 external hdd of 2Tb once, for a total of 6 gb. And in a year i've used only one, not this big investment. And when it's full i can take it, backup what i want to preserve and format

This post was last modified: 2012-07-31, 09:09 by Gunther.

@lapsefinger: Yes, I have a QNAP NAS.

@screamer: Important for timelapse is the bit depth of the images. And they are preserved. It doesn't matter if there is a light compression on pixel basis since we are going to show 30 pictures in one second later. Nobody will be able to see that. The lossy DNG compression is not like MPG2 or so where you see artifacts. Just try it out.

I haven't decided yet, but I might go for that solution. If I do, I'm going to keep a handful of the best images from each timelapse in full RAW for my stills library.