H.264 file size for 1 hr of HD video [closed]

Question

I'm looking for an order of magnitude estimate for expected on-disk file size for 1 hour of H.264 encoded HD video transcoded from HDV (HD on a MiniDV tape). I want to archive approximately 100 hours of such content and want to figure out whether I'm looking at a big hard drive, a multi-drive unit like a Drobo, or an enterprise-level storage system.

Edit

To clarify from several good comments, I am developing the software that will use this archived video and will also manage the transcoding from HDV to compressed format (using QuickTime on OS X). This question is for gathering hardware requirements. The video is from HDV and the transcoding does not have to happen in real time. I will not be streaming the video, so I'm looking for compression that maintains as much information as possible form the HDV content. The original HDV video is interlaced, but I can deinterlace it if that would help either file size or quality of the H264 compressed output.

Answer 1

It would be a couple of gigs per hour.

MPEG-4 (of which H.264 is a sub-part) define high quality as around 4Mbps. which would be 1.8GB per hour.

This can vary depending on the type of video and the type of compression used.