How much DV fits in a Gigabyte?
First, how big is a Gigabyte? Is it a decimal-derived 1,000,000,000 bytes, as some disk-drive vendors say? Or is it a binary-derived 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024x1024x1024) as the geeks say? Strictly speaking, the latter quantity is called a Gibibyte, a “binary Megabyte” is a Mebibyte (1,048,576 bytes) , and a “binary kilobyte” is a kibibyte (1024 bytes), abbreviated GiB, MiB, and KiB respectively. Thus there is about a 5% difference between Megabytes and Mebibytes, and a 7.4% difference between Gigabytes and Gibibytes. This terminology is not yet widely used: most folks still use Giga- and Mega- and Kilo- regardless of whether they’re using decimal or binary numbers. You usually have to look very closely at the spec sheets to determine how the numbers are derived. Sometimes “hybrid” numbers are used: some storage specifiers call a Megabyte one thousand 1024-byte blocks! A raw DV stream (such as captured by iMovie, or FASTstudio DV before it became Pinnacle edition DV) takes about 3.6 Meg
