Storage Requirement Calculator

Video bitrate is typically measured in megabits per second while audio bitrate is measured in kilobits per second, so even a high-quality 320 kbps audio track adds only about 0.32 Mbps on top of a video stream that's commonly tens to hundreds of Mbps -- audio is a rounding error next to video in nearly every real-world shoot. This is why storage planning almost always starts and ends with the video bitrate your codec and resolution combination produces.

Check your camera or recorder's technical specifications for the specific resolution, frame rate, and codec combination you're shooting -- manufacturers publish approximate bitrates for each recording mode, and RAW or ProRes formats typically list a data rate directly rather than a compressed bitrate. If you already have sample footage, most editing software and some file inspector tools display the actual bitrate of an existing clip, which is often more accurate than a published spec for variable-bitrate codecs.

It converts your total combined bitrate into how many minutes of footage a single common 128 GB memory card can hold before filling up, which is the practical number crews use on set to plan card swaps and figure out how many cards to bring for a shoot of a given length. If your actual cards are a different size, scale this figure proportionally -- a 256 GB card holds roughly double the minutes this output reports.

No -- Number of Cards only changes how the same total storage requirement is divided per card in the Per Card / Drive figure; it has no effect on Total Storage (GB) or Total Storage (TB), which depend only on bitrate and duration. Adding more cards to your kit spreads the same total footage into smaller, more manageable chunks per card, but it doesn't reduce the underlying amount of data your shoot generates.