Video Storage Calculator — Resolution, Codec & Length

Storage planning for acquisition works from the camera outward rather than from the delivery file backward, because the codec recorded on set is usually far heavier than anything an audience will ever stream. The governing quantity is sustained data rate in megabytes per second, which is simply the record bitrate divided by 8. That single number answers two questions at once: how many gigabytes an hour of recording consumes, and what minimum write speed the media must guarantee. Intermediate and mezzanine codecs dominate the budget because they are intra-frame, encoding every frame independently rather than storing differences between frames. Apple ProRes 422 at 3840 x 2160 and 29.97 fps runs near 471 Mbps, about 59 MB/s, while ProRes 422 HQ at the same settings runs near 707 Mbps, and camera RAW formats can exceed those figures several times over. Bit depth scales the budget roughly linearly above the 8-bit baseline, with 10-bit adding about 25 percent and 12-bit about 50 percent, in exchange for 1,024 or 4,096 levels per channel instead of 256 and much cleaner gradients under grading. Media must be rated for sustained rather than burst write: SD Video Speed Class V30, V60, and V90 guarantee 30, 60, and 90 MB/s continuous, and a 20 to 30 percent margin over the codec figure is standard. Two caveats dominate. Variable bitrate acquisition can undershoot the nominal rate by 30 to 50 percent on static scenes, and shooting ratios of 10:1 to 40:1 mean total project storage is set by how much is rolled, not by runtime.

Storage arithmetic became a daily production concern only after tape gave way to files. Videotape had fixed, self-evident capacity, so a 60-minute cassette held 60 minutes regardless of content. That certainty disappeared with Sony XDCAM, introduced in 2003 on Professional Disc media, and Panasonic P2, introduced in 2004 using solid-state cards, which forced crews to think in gigabytes and data rates for the first time. Removable flash media followed a parallel track: SanDisk introduced CompactFlash in 1994, the SD Association was formed in 2000, Speed Class ratings arrived in 2006, and the Video Speed Class marks V6 through V90 were defined in the SD 5.0 specification in 2016 specifically because class ratings based on average throughput were failing high-bitrate video. The CompactFlash Association published CFexpress 1.0 in 2017 to carry PCIe and NVMe speeds into camera bodies. The codecs that drive these budgets emerged alongside the media. Avid introduced DNxHD in 2004 as an intra-frame editing codec, and Apple released ProRes in 2007 with Final Cut Studio 2, both designed to trade file size for decode speed and grading latitude on the editorial side. For long-term retention, LTO tape has tracked the same curve, moving from 100 GB per LTO-1 cartridge in 2000 to 18 TB native on LTO-9 in 2021, which is why tape remains the cheapest per-terabyte archive tier in film and broadcast workflows.