Well, yeah. I record in 24b 96KHz, in stereo (or in one instance, with four incoming streams) which is 281.25 KB/s per stream... you really want to have those high numbers to get really good dynamic range in the original recording. My interface is pretty nice; its noise floor is a little over -105dB.

Hard real time is really only non-optional during the actual recording and digitization; at other times (basically, when I render out the song) it's okay. However, the downside of not having a machine that can keep up is that you can only do a best guess approximation of what it's going to sound like coming out until you actually render it and have a listen. I've been getting around it by selecting a few seconds and rendering it to get a feel for how the mix is going. That said, the audio up there is just off the floor, with the chatter between the two songs chopped out, so no mixing required. However, rendering that 9:07 took around fifty minutes, and that's with only one stereo track at 24b/96KHz -> 16b/44.1KHz; I can just imagine what it would've been like with a LOT of tracks being mixed into the render.

The video file ended up around 33 MB. The video software mp3 encoded the audio at 192KB/s. The source (16b/44.1KHz) wav file was 92.1 MB. The source data from the recording was around 300.5 MB.

While it took fifty minutes to go from the source audio to the CD quality wav (using "best" downsampling and no dithering) it only took about 25 to render that video there, at 320p. I also rendered a 480p (VGA) video, it took about forty minutes to do its schtick. I didn't go whole hog... I mean, we're talking about a photo there, ya know?

How big is 9:07 of HD uncompressed video with no audio? I'm asking because I have no idea... and maybe "reasonably uncompressed" or "very high quality" is a better modifier...

The biggest problem I'm running into is what to do with the original audio when I'm done with it? I don't have that big of a hard drive on that old laptop, and it's pretty easy to blow past a CD size when you're recording whole shows... but throwing it away seems such a waste.

Edit: btw- I have to say the new gear is so quiet it's amazing. The interface I was using before didn't support to super high quality audio, and was (literally, according to specs) 10,000x noisier.

When I listen to the high quality source audio, I can hear things like chairs squeaking, the tap on the footswitch that Josh makes when he's switching the leslie speed on the organ sound on his Nord, cars going by outside... though it also helps that I have very very nice condenser mics (a matched pair of Rode NT-5s).

Is that 1080p?