Which SD card for HD Video?

Barks

Barks

Barks

Soldato
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20 Jul 2008
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Just ordered a Canon 550D.
What specification SD card would I need to shoot in full 1080p?

There's a huge difference in price between a SanDisk 16 GB SDHC and a SanDisk 16 GB Extreme Pro (30 MB/s).

Also: How much video can I fit on a 16 GB card - roughly?


Cheers
 
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Hmm not sure this is relevant, but I have a small toshiba camcorder that does 1080p and runs happily with a Class 4 card -- however they use a pretty "advanced" x264 profile and thus are very compact video..

I would say don't buy anything less than class 6 anyway, otherwise it'll take forever to read it too!

(I just checked a movie I made on the 5DmkII, it's 47Mb/s; thats pretty fat!)
 
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BusError said:
Hmm not sure this is relevant, but I have a small toshiba camcorder that does 1080p and runs happily with a Class 4 card -- however they use a pretty "advanced" x264 profile and thus are very compact video..

I would say don't buy anything less than class 6 anyway, otherwise it'll take forever to read it too!

(I just checked a movie I made on the 5DmkII, it's 47Mb/s; thats pretty fat!)
Click to expand...

What!?

Even the most expensive SD cards I can find won't support 47MB/s :eek:
 
I have a 550d and brought a transcend HCSD 16gb class 10 and it has been flawless. Its fast and cheap (£15 quid from the online book shop). I even use this card when shooting higher bit rate video enabled with the magic lantern firmware and it has never missed a beat. According to the manual 16gb will do 49 minutes of 1080p video.
 
thebandit said:
I have a 550d and brought a transcend HCSD 16gb class 10 and it has been flawless. Its fast and cheap (£15 quid from the online book shop). I even use this card when shooting higher bit rate video enabled with the magic lantern firmware and it has never missed a beat. According to the manual 16gb will do 49 minutes of 1080p video.
Click to expand...

Cheers. What do you mean by higher bit rate video? Surely the 550D's inbuilt 1080p video mode produces the best possible quality video?
 
Its more complicated than that. The compressor hardware can compress more or less depending on a target compression "profile", and that affects the "bits per seconds of video" rate.. Also the type of scene you video will compress more or less, depending...

From what I know the Canon compresses in "variable bit rate" too, so it will try to keep the same quality level for the video, and will vary the bitrate dynamically to do so..
 
I don't think the limiting factor when choosing your SD card is video - the camera needs to write data more quickly when taking photos in burst mode. For example my 500D takes 15 megapixel JPEGs at upto 3.4 fps - that equates to about 30MB/s (that's B, not b) which is a lot more than 1080p video.

Having said that I use class 6 cards and have never had any issue - I guess the camera has a pretty big buffer, and you don't often take photo bursts for more than a few seconds at a time.
 
Check your cameras manual, it will say.

On my Nikon you need at least a class 6. I'd expect cannon to be similar.

I use a class 10 by indegrul works fine, cost £12 for 16gb online.

Movies a limited to 10 mins due to the 4gb limit on file size.
 
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