How Big is One Video?

My phone has been yelling at me for weeks, trying to inform me that I am nearly out of storage. Personally, I accept it as an inevitable part of being a new mom. But professionally, we absolutely can not run out of storage for a project, especially if we are in the middle of a shoot. Clients, too, sometimes ask to keep all their raw footage when the project is finished, leading to the important question, “Do you have enough room for it?” So… how much storage does one video actually take?

#ProTip: A day of videography can capture about 100GB of HD footage.

Now, to be clear, the size of the project will vary widely depending on how long the shoot was, how many cameras were running and the resolution of the footage. One of our current projects clocks in at nearly 1TB (that’s 1,000GB!). But most commonly, a day of videography with one camera shooting in HD will capture about 100GB of footage. If you are filming your own project, I recommend buying an external hard drive so you don’t bog down your computer (and if you’re editing on it, the drive must spin at 7200rpm… but that’s a whole other topic). Or if you have us film your project, we store all your raw footage, free, for at least one year so you can use it later. The good news is that your final, edited video is usually less than 2GB — meaning that you can keep the best of the best, and let us worry about the other ~98GB. Now if only I could clear up my phone that easily…

Katie Rutter is the COO of Thing in a Pot Productions. She has received multiple awards for her work, including a nomination for a Chicago/Midwest Emmy in 2021 and being declared Video Producer of the Year in 2018 by the Catholic Press Association. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our video ProTips in your inbox every month!