Digital Workshop

Hi
I work for a college for young adults with learning difficulties, that is just starting to track student progress/life. At the moment I am using a web based system, but we have been looking at Opus as being more user friendly for our student group. I have 105 students to track over 3 years, so potentially could have 315 sites on the go at the same time! These sites are anything from 30 to 45 pages and include lots of digital images and video. When the student leaves college they will be presented with, hopefully, not more than one CD for each year.

I really need to know if it is feasable to use Opus in this way or will the disc space required be prohibitive.
Thanks

Text within OPUS, like word processing documents, are fairly small in terms of bytes. As a general rule, figure 11MB per minute of MPEG-1 video, and 1-2MB per minute for mono audio files which are in the WAV format. JPG images which are sized for viewing on a 1024.768, or 800x600 screen take less than 400kb, which will not compress much/any within OPUS.

My business-to-business interactive, multimedia presentations are generally under 200MB, though I just finished one with additional video files which came in at 420MB. I have never had a problem fitting a presentation onto a CD-ROM.

The key to your question is probably not how much text you will store in 3 years, but rather how much video you will include; how much audio; and how many photos.

I hope these guidelines help your decision to use OPUS.

Hi

Thanks for the answer, it gives me a good idea of how many CD's will be required.

Can you also answer if possible how much hard disc space I would need. There is a rolling student population of 105 students, over the 3 years, so never less that 315 sites/publications. The amount of video etc there will be is variable. The most I have used to date (6 months into the project) is 3x5 minute videos, a 1minute audio introduction and 47 photos, there are 45 pages on this site so far.

Thanks

The video is the largest element you will be working with. When you capture video from a digital camcorder it is usually saved as an AVI file to give you editing options and different output possibilities. With audio compression turned ON, you can expect to see 1GB of hard drive space for each 17 minutes of AVI video.

Once you edit the video, and convert it into an MPEG-1 file, you could delete the AVI source, but then you can't re-edit what you did. If you start saving the AVI files, you can see you will be dealing with huge amounts of hard drive usuage.

Three five minute MPEG-1 videos should be (3x55MB) 165MB. Your one minute audo (WAV) file should be 2.5MB. Forty-seven JPEG photos at 550k each is 25MB. I'll let you do the math on what that will take.

Thanks, looks like I might end up in trouble if not very careful. Might stick to web sites where I can at least compress the whole lot!

Regards and thanks again.