Data & backup planner

How much space does H.265 200 Mbit/s take?

H.265 200 Mbit/s records at a fixed bitrate: 200 Mbit/s is 90.0 GB per hour — whatever the resolution or frame rate.

H.265 200 Mbit/s in H.265 200 Mbit/s, 25 fps, 3 h a day for 4 days: 1.08 TB of footage, 3.24 TB with three copies. Change cameras, hours and days below.
Copies of every card
Copies run in parallel; the slowest drive sets the pace.
CameraCodecResolutionfpsh/dayRate
    Footage per day
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    Footage, whole shoot
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    Incl. all copies
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    Drives needed
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    Offload per day
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    Left after wrap
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    What the fixed rate means on set

    Higher frame rates do not grow the file, they thin out the data per frame: at 100 fps each frame gets a quarter of what it gets at 25 fps. For slow motion with lots of movement that shows as blocking in the grade. Long-GOP codecs also stress editing machines — many productions transcode to ProRes or DNxHR before the edit, and that copy needs its own space.

    H.265 200 Mbit/s: storage by footage length
    FootageSizeEdit proxy ProRes 422 HQ UHD 25p
    1 h90.0 GB332 GB
    2 h180 GB663 GB
    4 h360 GB1.33 TB
    8 h720 GB2.65 TB

    How long a card lasts

    Minutes of recording per card (200 Mbit/s). The last column is the time a DIT needs to copy that card once to an NVMe SSD at a sustained 850 MB/s, plus a verification pass.

    H.265 200 Mbit/s: recording time per card
    CardRecording timeOffload + verify
    256 GB2 h 51 min10 min
    512 GB5 h 41 min20 min
    1 TB11 h 7 min39 min
    2 TB22 h 13 min1 h 18 min

    H.265 200 Mbit/s next to its siblings

    The same hour of footage in every variant of the family (nominal bitrate). The step to the next quality level is usually the cheaper decision than it looks: drives cost less than a reshoot, but every step also lengthens the offload.

    H.265 200 Mbit/s compared with related codecs
    CodecGB per hourvs. H.265 200 Mbit/sOffload of 1 h at 850 MB/s
    H.264 100 Mbit/s45.0 GB−50 %1 min
    H.264 ALL-I 400 Mbit/s180 GB+100 %4 min
    H.265 50 Mbit/s22.5 GB−75 %0 min
    H.265 200 Mbit/s90.0 GB—2 min

    Cameras that record H.265 200 Mbit/s

    In our camera list: Sony FX3, Sony Burano, Canon EOS R5 C, Panasonic Lumix S1H, Panasonic Lumix GH6, DJI Mavic 3 Pro (Drohne), DJI Inspire 3 (Drohne). The tool above has each of them as a preset, with the codecs and frame rates the body actually offers.

    Frequently asked

    How much storage does one hour of H.265 200 Mbit/s need?

    At any resolution: 90.0 GB.

    Why does my card show less space than its label?

    Cards are labelled in decimal units (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes); some operating systems count in binary units and show about 931 GB for a 1 TB card. The numbers on this page are decimal, like the label.