One episode of South Park takes about 500-700MB at my current Q setting of 2 but looks amazing--close to the original DVD which is around 1GB for an episode.
Ahhh, cartoons...........
These are kind of a special case
With the right software, you can shrink these down to tiny sizes
It's a lot of information to give and at the moment I'm kind of stuck for time, so I can't give you all the answers right here
I'd suggest getting avisynth and going to the forums on
http://www.doom9.orgSearch for cartoons and see what you come up on - or post and see how they can help you
The entire board is dedicated to encoding of one type or another
What you want to look for is how to smooth out large flat areas and sharpen the edges of things
Using a 'sharper' version of the origional and a lower q ratio should give a smaller file size and equal result
using avisynth you can create a file called (for example)
myvideo.avs
this would be a text file that you edit in notepad etc
the contents would look something like this
avisource("c:\myvideo.avi")
sharpen(0.4)
that would simply sharpen the edges of the video so you could use a lower q ratio
sharpen(0.6) would sharpen it more etc
there's a load of things you can do as standard, and lots of plugins as well
on the storage side, it's kind of hard to give any help
if you just need 500mb - great get a network drive
on the other hand if you can see that you'll need more than you can fit in your pc (and this is hard to guess because they're all different)
the cheapest bet is to buy a cpu,ram,case with lots of slots, motherboard) and just fill it up with cheap hard drives
that's what I did - 2 pc's, one with 10 300gb drives and the other with 7 300gb drives - if i want i can add 3 more 300gb drives at £60 each
works great and if you don't need them all in one go it's even better - you only have to fork out £60 at a time when you need them