Do I need 10 or 20MB/s SDHC for recording 720p movie?

[F u r u y á]

Do I need 10 or 20MB/s SDHC for recording 720p movie in a digital camera like Canon SD780?


Example of such SDHC card: Sandisk Ultra and Extreme.

[Steve McDonald]

Do I need 10 or 20MB/s SDHC for recording 720p movie in a digital camera like Canon SD780?


Example of such SDHC card: Sandisk Ultra and Extreme.

A SanDisk Ultra II would be a very good choice. It's technically rated as Class 4, but actually performs much faster. I used one successfully with a Canon
SX1 for HD video, at a bit-rate of 42.5 Mbps, which is much faster than the SD780 uses.

Steve McDonald

[F u r u y á]

I saw in Canon website that the bitrate for 720p recording is 3MB/s. So I bought a standard class 6 SDHC, I think it should be fine for recording 720p, right?

[Steve McDonald]

Do I need 10 or 20MB/s SDHC for recording 720p movie in a digital camera like Canon SD780?


Example of such SDHC card: Sandisk Ultra and Extreme.

A SanDisk Ultra II will do fine. I've used one for the HD video of a Canon SX1, which has a much higher bit-rate than the SD780.

Properly, the transfer rate for data is expressed in Megabits per second (Mbps), not Megabytes per second (MBps). Megabytes are the measure of size, not speed, such as storage capacity and file sizes for photos, video and any type of digital data. It takes 8 Megabits of data transfer per second to fill up 1 Megabyte of storage per second, so when memory card speed is improperly described as MBps, you need to multiply that by 8 to get the correct Mbps speed.

Some companies, such as broadband service providers, deliberately describe their downloading and uploading speeds as so many MBps, when in fact, they only give you Mbps. This corruption of the terminology leaves you wondering sometimes, what the claimed speeds really are.

[F u r u y á]

Steve McDonald, I am fully aware of that, but thank you anyway.


About the standard class 6 SDHC:

We could sucessfully record 720p @ 30fps movies with Transcend 8GB class 6 SDHC, no problems so far.