Video Editing Project Storage Calculator

Why video projects eat storage faster than you think

Nothing fills a hard drive like a video project. Raw footage is the biggest culprit: an hour of high-quality 4K camera footage can weigh over 50 GB, and most editors shoot far more than they ever use. A project that ends as a 10-minute video often starts with hours of raw clips. Then the editing workflow multiplies that footprint. Proxy files — lower-resolution copies your editing software generates so playback stays smooth — add roughly another 25 percent on top of the raw media. Render files, preview caches, and project files pile on more, and every export creates yet another copy. Before you know it, a single modest project needs several times the space of the original footage.

How the storage math works

File size comes straight from the bitrate of the recording: bitrate in megabits per second, multiplied by time, divided by 8, gives you megabytes. A typical 1080p camera records around 30 Mbps, which works out to about 13.5 GB per hour of footage. Jump to 4K and a common recording rate is 120 Mbps, or roughly 54 GB per hour — four times the appetite. Proxies add about a quarter of the raw footage size on top, since they are simply smaller copies of the same material. Exports are a separate bill: a 1080p H.264 master runs about 12 Mbps, a 4K H.265 export around 45 Mbps, and an intermediate codec like ProRes 422 can hit 147 Mbps. Multiply your expected final length by the export bitrate to size the masters, then add raw plus proxies to get the full project footprint.

Worked example

Imagine you are cutting two projects, each with 5 hours of 1080p footage and a 30-minute final edit delivered as 1080p H.264. The raw footage is 30 Mbps × 5 hours ÷ 8 ÷ 1024, about 65.9 GB. With proxies switched on, add 25 percent: another 16.5 GB. Each 30-minute export at 12 Mbps needs about 2.6 GB, so two of them take 5.3 GB. The total is roughly 87.7 GB. On a 500 GB drive that leaves about 412.3 GB of breathing room — comfortable — and a 500 GB drive is the recommended minimum for this workload. Double the footage or move to 4K and the numbers climb fast, which is why planning ahead matters.

Practical tips

Shoot with intent: every hour of footage you do not need is another 13 to 54 GB you have to store. Always use proxies for 4K work — they cost a quarter of the raw size but make editing dramatically smoother on average computers, and you can delete them the moment a project ships. Clear render and preview files after delivery instead of letting them accumulate. Keep a 20 to 30 percent buffer on any drive you buy, because drives slow down and editing gets risky when they are nearly full. And split your storage by job: a fast SSD for active projects where speed matters, and a big, cheap hard drive or NAS for finished archives you rarely touch.