BASALT · JOURNAL
What a discovery production actually weighs
Anyone planning document work should have rough figures in mind for what arrives, because the difference between the shapes of production is the difference between minutes and hours of machine time.
Rough figures
Native text exports, such as correspondence produced directly from a mail system, run a few kilobytes a page. A ten thousand page export can be under a hundred megabytes.
Scanned paper at 300 DPI in greyscale runs a few hundred kilobytes a page. A thousand pages is a few hundred megabytes.
Scanned paper in colour is roughly three times that. Colour scans of documents that are entirely black text are common and wasteful, and they are what turns a manageable production into a large one.
Mixed productions are the norm, and their averages describe nothing useful.
Planning from the right number
Ask for the size in bytes, not just the page count. A production letter quotes pages, and pages do not predict machine time.
Then budget:
Disk, at roughly three times the input size, to cover the original, a working copy, and the output.
Machine time for redaction, at about a second per marked scanned page and a tenth of that per marked text page. Cost follows marked pages, not total pages.
OCR time separately, if the production has no text layer, since it analyses every page and is the longest single step on a large scanned set.
The step people forget
Verification of what arrived. A production received from another party may carry metadata, attachments, earlier revisions and failed redactions, and all of those are worth knowing about before the material is used or produced onward.
That check is cheap. Extracting text and searching it across a large document takes seconds, and reading structure is similarly fast.
Why size matters more than it used to
Productions have grown because scanning has become cheap and defaults have become generous. A department scanning everything in colour at 600 DPI produces documents four times larger than necessary, and nobody notices until somebody has to process them.
If you control the scanning, greyscale at 300 DPI is the sensible default for typed documents, and it makes every subsequent step faster.
Frequently asked questions
How large is a typical legal discovery production?
Native text exports run a few kilobytes per page, so ten thousand pages can be under a hundred megabytes. Scanned paper runs a few hundred kilobytes per page in greyscale and roughly three times that in colour, so a thousand scanned pages is commonly several hundred megabytes.
How much disk space should I budget for a production?
Around three times the input size, to hold the original, a working copy during processing, and the output. A 1 GB production is realistically a 3 GB job.
How do I estimate redaction time for a production?
Count marked pages rather than total pages. Allow about a second per marked scanned page and a tenth of that per marked text page. Unmarked pages are copied through and cost almost nothing.
What should I check on a production I receive?
Whether it has a text layer, whether metadata and attachments carry information, whether earlier revisions survive in the file, and whether any redactions in it actually removed content. All of these are quick to check and useful to know before producing the material onward.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit with eighteen tools in one window. It opens large documents without loading them into memory, renders pages on demand, and copies files into its engine in fixed-size chunks, so peak memory follows the chunk size rather than the file size. Redaction destroys content rather than covering it, and an independent verifier re-opens every written file to prove the material is gone before the file is saved. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, it is free for the first 24 hours, and the engine holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. Download it at basaltformac.com.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.