Loading page
About this tool
Plan card and drive space for a shoot: storage per hour by codec, resolution, frame rate and audio track count.
This calculator converts a codec's data rate into storage: gigabytes per hour equals the combined video and audio bitrate in megabits per second multiplied by 3,600 and divided by 8. Intraframe codecs such as ProRes and DNxHR are scaled by pixels per second, so changing resolution or frame rate updates the figure the way the camera actually behaves. Shooters, DITs and producers use it to size cards, shuttle drives and archive budgets before a shoot rather than after.
Open Footage Storage Per Hour Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
ProRes and DNxHR rates recompute from pixels per second, not a fixed table row
Uncompressed PCM tracks are added at channels x bit depth x sample rate
Shows both the GB on the card label and the GiB your operating system reports
About 330 GB per hour at UHD 3840x2160 25p, because ProRes 422 HQ runs roughly 734 Mbps at that pixel rate. The same codec at 1920x1080 29.97p is 220 Mbps, which works out to 99 GB per hour.
Manufacturers count 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes while operating systems display gibibytes of 1,073,741,824 bytes, a gap of about 7%. A 256 GB card therefore shows around 238 GiB, and formatting overhead takes a little more.
For intraframe codecs, yes and almost linearly: doubling from 25 to 50 fps roughly doubles the data rate because twice as many complete frames are encoded each second. Fixed-bitrate camera modes such as a 100 Mbps XAVC S setting hold the same rate and lose quality instead.
Add about 20% for long-GOP H.264 and H.265 formats, whose bitrate rises with motion and detail, and keep at least 10-15% free space on any card or SSD so writes stay fast. Intraframe codecs are near constant, so the calculated figure is close to final.
Add the Footage Storage Per Hour Calculatorwidget to your blog or website — free, responsive, no signup. Just keep the “Widget by AltFTool” credit link visible.
<iframe src="https://www.altftool.com/embed/widget/footage-storage-per-hour-calculator"
title="Footage Storage Per Hour Calculator — free AltFTool widget"
width="100%" height="640" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;overflow:hidden"
loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:12px;margin:4px 0 0">Widget by <a href="https://www.altftool.com/tools/all/footage-storage-per-hour-calculator?utm_source=embed&utm_medium=widget">AltFTool — free online tools</a></p>