Drone Footage Storage Calculator

Why drone footage fills cards so fast

Drones don't record video the way phones do. A phone constantly re-compresses footage to keep files small, while most drones record at a high fixed bitrate so you get clean footage to edit later. At 1080p that bitrate is usually around 10 Mbps, which works out to roughly 4.4 GB for every hour of flight. Move up to 4K at 40 Mbps and the same hour costs you about 17.6 GB. Push to 5.1K at 60 Mbps and you're burning through roughly 26.4 GB per hour. Add a few still photos on top, and a busy month of flying can quietly chew through a 128 GB card without you noticing.

How the storage estimate works

This calculator uses the bitrate behind your resolution choice, not a guess. Video data is flight hours × 3,600 seconds × bitrate, divided by 8 to get megabytes and by 1,024 to get gigabytes. Photos are counted separately: your monthly photo count times the average file size (about 5 MB for JPEG, about 25 MB for RAW), again in gigabytes. The two are added for your monthly total, multiplied by 12 for the yearly projection, and then divided by your microSD card size — rounded up — to tell you how many cards a month of flying actually needs.

A real month of flying, worked out

Say you fly 8 hours a month in 4K and snap 150 JPEG photos, and you own 128 GB cards. The video math is 8 × 3,600 × 40 ÷ 8 ÷ 1,024 = 140.6 GB. The photos add 150 × 5 ÷ 1,024 = 0.7 GB. That's 141.4 GB a month — about 1,696.3 GB over a year — which means one 128 GB card is not enough: you need 2 cards, and the second one will only hold 13.4 GB before it's full. That's the moment most pilots realize their "big card" plan was really a "two-card" plan all along.

Tips to make your cards last longer

Shoot in 2.7K when you don't truly need 4K — at 25 Mbps it costs about 11.2 GB an hour instead of 17.6. Offload footage to a laptop or drive after every flying day instead of letting cards pile up. Buy cards rated V30 or U3 for 4K and above; a cheap card can drop frames exactly when you capture something great. Keep one spare card in your drone bag, because the card that is "almost full" is the one that fills up mid-flight. And clear test clips and accidental pocket videos before a real shoot — they add up faster than you'd think.