Video & Storage
4K Video Storage Calculator
Plan storage for a 4K shoot: per hour, per day, per week and per month, across every camera.
Free to useNo sign-up requiredNo watermarkRuns in your browser
A 4K project’s storage needs can differ by a factor of ten depending on the codec. An hour of 4K H.265 from a mirrorless camera might be 30 GB; the same hour in ProRes 422 HQ is close to 400 GB. Getting the codec right matters more than anything else in the plan.
Choose UHD or DCI 4K, a frame rate and a codec, and the calculator fills in a typical bitrate - Apple’s published target rates for ProRes, and round mid-range figures for H.264, H.265 and raw. Add your recording hours, shooting days and cameras to see the total, and enter your camera’s own bitrate to replace the estimate.
How this tool works
Choose the format
4K UHD (3840 × 2160) or DCI 4K (4096 × 2160), and the frame rate.
Choose the codec
H.264, H.265, ProRes 422, ProRes 422 HQ or RAW-class. A typical bitrate is filled in.
Override the bitrate if you know it
Type the figure from your camera or recorder in Mbps or MB/s.
Describe the shoot
Hours recorded per day, number of days and number of cameras.
Read the storage plan
Per camera-hour, per day, per week, per month, total, and total with a backup copy.
How it works
Storage per hour is the bitrate multiplied by 3,600 seconds and divided by 8 to turn bits into bytes. At 100 Mbps, that is 45 GB per camera-hour.
Per day multiplies by the hours recorded and the number of cameras. Per week and per month assume you shoot every day of a 7-day week or a 30-day month, which suits continuous recording; for a production, use the total, which multiplies by your actual shooting days.
ProRes figures come from the target data rates in Apple’s ProRes white paper for 3840 × 2160 and 4096 × 2160 at each frame rate. ProRes is variable-bitrate, but Apple notes that real files are usually close to the target. H.264 and H.265 figures are typical camera values; raw is represented at ProRes 4444-level rates as a rough stand-in.
The “with one backup copy” figure doubles the total, because footage that exists in only one place is not really safe. Many productions keep three copies.
Common use cases
- Sizing SSDs and RAID arrays before a multi-camera 4K shoot.
- Deciding whether to record ProRes on an external recorder or stay in the camera’s H.265.
- Budgeting a month of 4K content creation or security-style continuous recording.
- Estimating how many cards to rotate on set, and how long each offload will take.
Typical 4K bitrates by codec (UHD, 29.97 fps)
ProRes values are Apple’s published target data rates. The others are typical figures; cameras vary a lot - check your camera’s specification for the mode you use.
| H.265 / HEVC (typical camera) | ≈75 Mbps · 34 GB/hour |
|---|---|
| H.264 / AVC (typical camera) | ≈100 Mbps · 45 GB/hour |
| ProRes 422 LT | 410 Mbps · 185 GB/hour |
| ProRes 422 | 589 Mbps · 265 GB/hour |
| ProRes 422 HQ | 884 Mbps · 398 GB/hour |
| ProRes 4444 | 1,326 Mbps · 597 GB/hour |
Mbps vs MB/s, and GB vs GiB
Video bitrates are quoted in megabits per second (Mbps, lower-case b). Storage is sold in megabytes and gigabytes (MB, GB, capital B). A byte is 8 bits, so 100 Mbps is 12.5 MB/s, and an hour at 100 Mbps is 45 GB. Mixing the two up gives an answer eight times too big or too small.
Cards and drives are labelled in decimal units: 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows and some other systems count in binary units (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes) but still label them “GB”, so a 128 GB card shows as about 119 GB. Nothing is missing - it is the same space counted differently. This calculator uses decimal units throughout.
Formula
Per camera-hour
bitrate (bits/s) × 3,600 ÷ 8
Per day
per hour × hours per day × cameras
Total
per day × shooting days
With backup
total × 2
Worked examples
Two hours a day for five days, 4K H.264 at 100 Mbps
100 Mbps is 45 GB per hour, so 90 GB per day and 450 GB for the five days - 900 GB once you keep a backup copy.
Three cameras recording at 50 MB/s, four hours a day for two days
50 MB/s is 400 Mbps, or 180 GB per camera-hour. Three cameras for four hours is 2.16 TB per day and 4.32 TB for the shoot.
Frequently asked questions
How many GB is one hour of 4K video?
It depends on the codec and bitrate: roughly 20–45 GB for typical in-camera H.265 or H.264, around 265 GB for ProRes 422 at UHD 29.97p, and about 398 GB for ProRes 422 HQ. Enter your camera’s bitrate for your exact figure.
Is DCI 4K bigger than UHD?
Slightly. DCI 4K is 4096 pixels wide instead of 3840, about 6.7% more pixels, and ProRes data rates scale with frame size. For H.264 and H.265 the camera’s chosen bitrate matters far more than the frame width.
Does 60 fps double the storage?
For ProRes, close to it: each frame is compressed independently, so data rate scales with frame rate (UHD ProRes 422 HQ is 884 Mbps at 29.97p and 1,768 Mbps at 59.94p). Long-GOP H.264 and H.265 cameras usually raise the bitrate by less than double.
How accurate is the raw figure?
Only roughly. Raw formats let you choose a compression level, and the data rate can vary several-fold between settings. Use your camera’s data-rate table and enter the figure as your own bitrate.
Why keep a backup copy in the plan?
Drives fail and cards get lost. Planning for at least two copies of every file from the first offload is standard practice, so the calculator shows that figure alongside the total.