does anyone know how many minutes or hours of video will fit on 1 Gigabyte of space at 12 Mega Pixels?

Hi Offio:

When it comes to video, "megapixels" are a mostly useless specification. What it does tell me, though, is that you are planning on using a still camera with video features.

Video comes in two basic "flavors": Standard Definition (SDTV) and High Definition (HDTV). In digital pixel terms, American SDTV has 640x480 pixels (or 720x480, with rectangular pixels), resulting in about 1/3 of a Megapixel. The best-quality HDTV has 1920x1080 pixels, resulting in just over 2 Megapixels, so you can see why a still camera's 12 Megapixel rating is meaningless when it comes to video. All the extra pixels are just "interpolated" (or discarded) to create the video image that's stored.

Each camera maker has its own system of "quality settings" even with the same HDTV format (it boils down to the data-rate ―in Megabits per second― for each setting), so that the lower quality settings will store more "time" onto the same amount of space in a flash card. And different makers use different "codecs" (compression & file formats) for storing the files: AVCHD and H.264/MP4 are smaller files compared to most AVI and MOV formats.

Without knowing the brand and model # of your camera/camcorder, it would be hard to guess at the "time storage" capacity other than to give you best-case and worst-case examples (probably not helpful at all, since they are extremely different numbers!).

Use the "Additional Details" link on the Action Bar to add what make & model #, and I or another Yahooligan can give you a recording time estimate.

Also, out of curiosity, is this for a job-site documentation use? (I enjoy your wind-turbine discussions here and elsewhere on the 'net.)

hope this helps,

--Dennis C.