You want to preserve your church history – save on video your pastor sermons, band performances, youth meetings and Sunday school activities.  Your video archive can be large, but how it relates to the disk space provided by the video streaming hosting?

First, we need to determine the quality of videos that will be stored. This can vary from average, to DVD like and to high definition quality. The better the quality the bigger video files will be and more disk space they will utilize.

Second, you need to think about your viewers. Who will watch your services, and how fast is their Internet connection. If some of your viewers use basic DSL service, it may take awhile to load video files encoded with a high bit rate. At the same time low bit rate may not provide sufficient quality. One option is to encode files with a medium quality around 5ooKbps, which usually provides sufficient quality and high accessibility. Another option is to encode files in multiple bit rates ranging from low to high quality, providing viewers on the web site to select desired video quality.

Third, you should consider encoding files in high quality for future use. Internet and video streaming technologies evolve quickly. Video encoding is a very time consuming process. It may take days or even months to encode your video library. If you do it in a low quality, you will need to re-encode from master copies again when Internet speed and technology improves. You can avoid double work, if your video archive is encoded in multiple bit rates from the beginning.

Fourth, plan for the future growth. We keep buying more storage every year. How much disk space is enough? Well it is never enough, isn’t? You can calculate current video archive size and account for a yearly growth. After a year you can re-evaluate your storage needs, and hopefully storage prices will go down.

Fifth, store your video archive in more than one place. Always keep a secondary copy of the files you encoded, especially if this archive contains years of your church history.

Now, some math and calculations. File size will depend on bit rate (as it was described above) and the duration of the video recording. Lets use 3 different bit rates  of 256Kbps, 512Kbps and 1Mbps as an example for our calculation. Duration of the video file will be 1 hr, again this is just for the calculation purposes only.

Therefore resulting file size will be 256Kbps/8*60*60 – about 115 MB, 512Kbps file will be around 230MB and 1Mbps file will be about 460MB.
Depending on your decision to store one or more files in the video archive, your storage requirements for video files will range from 115MB per hour to 805MB (115+230+460).

If your storage capacity is 100GB, you will be able to keep about 860 hrs of recording encoded at 256Kbps.

100,000/115 = 869.

If your files encoded at 512Kbps, 100GB will be sufficient to store 430 hrs of video, or  only 215 hrs of files encoded at 1Mbps quality.

Practical decision:

There are 52 weeks in a year plus some holidays, or special events when your church will record activities. Assuming average duration of a video is 2hrs, therefore your church will have at least 52 x 2 = 104 hours of video recordings in a year.

Have fun and do your math!!!