Screen Recording Size Estimator

Why screen recordings get so big, so fast

A screen recording is just a video of your display, but modern displays have so many pixels that the file adds up quicker than most people expect. A one-hour 1080p recording can easily pass 5 GB, and the same session in 4K at 60 frames per second can pass 10 GB in under ten minutes. Most people only discover this when their laptop storage flashes a warning mid-project, or when a recording refuses to upload because it blows past a platform's file-size limit. Knowing the approximate size before you press record turns all of that into a non-event: you can pick settings that fit your storage and your purpose.

How the estimate works

The file size of a screen recording is almost entirely decided by one number: the bitrate, measured in megabits per second. Bitrate is set by three things — the resolution (how many pixels), the frame rate (how many pictures per second), and the quality preset (how much detail the encoder keeps). This estimator uses realistic H.264-style bitrates for each resolution at 30 fps — 4 Mbps for 720p, 8 Mbps for 1080p, 16 Mbps for 1440p and 40 Mbps for 4K — scales them with your chosen frame rate, and multiplies by your quality preset. The size then follows a simple conversion: bitrate in Mbps times duration in seconds, divided by 8 to get megabytes.

A worked example

Suppose you are recording a 60-minute software tutorial at 1080p, 30 fps, on the "Better" preset. The estimator takes the 1080p base bitrate of 8 Mbps, keeps the 30 fps frame rate as a 1x multiplier, and multiplies by the 1.5x quality preset — an effective bitrate of 12 Mbps. Twelve megabits per second times 3,600 seconds is 43,200 megabits, divided by 8 gives 5,400 MB, which is about 5.27 GB. Record the exact same tutorial at 720p on the "Good" preset and it drops to roughly 1.76 GB — small enough to upload anywhere without thinking twice.

Practical tips

If you only need viewers to follow along, 1080p at 30 fps is the sweet spot — 4K mostly helps if people will watch fullscreen on a 4K display or zoom into details. Tutorials and slides record fine at 15 or 24 fps, which cuts the file roughly in half compared to 60 fps; save 60 fps for gameplay and fast mouse work. The "Good" preset looks perfectly fine for spoken tutorials and shared windows. And if a platform caps uploads at 2 GB, run the numbers here first and drop one notch of resolution or quality before recording — re-encoding a giant file later takes longer than getting it right at the source.