Storage arithmetic
How much storage does 4K video take?
From 150 MB a minute to 10 GB a minute.
Both of those are 3840 by 2160. The resolution is the same in every row of this page. What changes the file by a factor of sixty-six is the codec and the bitrate it was written at. Here is the arithmetic, the table, and what the numbers mean for a real shoot.
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Updated September 2026
The number first
4K is not a file size:
the codec is doing all the work.
A minute of 4K video takes about 150 MB if it is a normal delivery export, and about 10 GB if it is a 4:4:4 mastering codec. Same 3840 by 2160 frame, same running time, sixty-six times the bytes. Resolution is the variable everybody reaches for and it is the least important one on the list.
150 MB
A minute at 20 Mb/s
A normal 4K delivery export. Nine gigabytes an hour.
1.13 GB
A minute at 150 Mb/s
A high-bitrate HEVC master, the file worth keeping online. 67.5 GB an hour.
6.6 GB
A minute of UHD mastering codec
The ProRes 422 HQ class. Close to 400 GB an hour.
66x
Between the two ends
Nothing changed but the codec and the bitrate it was written at.
The arithmetic is one line and it needs no source. Take the bitrate in megabits per second, divide it by eight to get megabytes per second, and multiply by sixty. That is megabytes per minute. Multiply by sixty again for an hour. A 20 Mb/s file is 2.5 MB every second, 150 MB every minute, 9 GB every hour, and it does not matter whether those bits are describing a 4K frame, an HD frame or a phone screen.
That is why the honest answer to this question is a question back: which 4K file do you mean? The one the camera wrote, the one the edit is cutting, the one the colourist delivered, or the one the client is going to click. On a single job those four files differ by three orders of magnitude, and people who run out of disk have almost always budgeted for one of them and ended up storing all four.
The table
Every format a working shoot touches,
what it costs a minute.
Every row states the bitrate it is using, so the arithmetic is checkable. Divide the bitrate by eight, multiply by sixty, and you should land on the per-minute column.
The three ProRes rows are scaled arithmetic, not Apple's published UHD figure: Apple's own page gives target data rates at 1920x1080 and 29.97 fps, and this table multiplies them by four for the pixel count. Treat them as the order of magnitude and read Apple's ProRes specification for the exact UHD target rate at your frame rate. DNxHR covers the same ground in the same class; Avid publishes the exact data rate for each tier at each frame size, and the division above works there unchanged. Fetched 9 September 2026.
Two things fall out of the table. The first is that a delivery export and a mastering codec are not the same kind of object at all, and comparing them by resolution is like comparing a photograph to a negative by counting the inches. The second is that frame rate multiplies everything: a mastering codec writes each frame in full, so 60p costs roughly twice what 24p costs at the same frame size, in every row above.
The mistake
Budget for the shoot,
not for the clip.
Almost nobody under-budgets the clip. People under-budget the day, because the four things that sit beside the footage never make it into the estimate.
Take a two-camera day, six hours rolling on each body, recording UHD in the ProRes 422 HQ class. That is twelve camera-hours. At about 396 GB an hour the negative alone is roughly 4.75 TB, and it is 4.75 TB on the shoot day, not after you have culled, because nothing gets deleted before the edit begins. Now add the three items that are always forgotten.
The audio line is arithmetic: 24 bits times 48,000 samples is 1.152 Mb/s per track, times eight tracks. The proxy line uses Apple's published ProRes 422 Proxy target data rate of approximately 45 Mb/s at 1920x1080 and 29.97 fps, fetched 9 September 2026. Every other figure comes from the format table above. Change the camera count, the hours or the codec and the shape of the answer does not change.
The drive bought for “about five terabytes of footage” is already full before the edit starts, and it was the proxies and the cache that did it, not the footage. That is the failure mode: the negative is the number people plan for and the working set is the number that actually lands on the disk.
The multiplier nobody counts
One film exists
in seven different sizes.
A finished six-minute piece is not one file. It is a negative, a working set, a proxy set, a master, a viewing export, a set of social cutdowns, and an archive copy. Each one is real, each one lives somewhere, and only one of them is ever watched.
Selects taken as a fifth of the negative, the usual ratio on a scripted or branded job; scale it to your own keep rate. Every size on this table comes from the bitrates stated in the format table, divided by eight and multiplied out. A six-minute film at 150 Mb/s is 6.75 GB; four cutdowns of the same length at 20 Mb/s are 900 MB each.
This is the number that fills a drive, and it is the number that decides what you pay to keep work available. Six terabytes for one film sounds absurd until you notice that five of them are a negative that belongs on a RAID you already own, and that the part which needs to be online for a client, a festival or a hiring producer is ten gigabytes.
Hours per plan
What fits in 100 GB, 500 GB or 1.5 TB
depends entirely on which file you put in it.
Same arithmetic, run backwards. Plan storage divided by gigabytes per hour gives hours of 4K. The spread across a single column is the whole point of this page.
Storage in decimal terabytes: 1.5 TB is 1,500 GB, so the first row is 1,500 divided by 9 GB an hour. Plans: Starter is free with 5 GB hot, Lite $9 a month or $90 a year for 100 GB, Pro $25 or $250 for 500 GB, Max $75 or $750 for 1.5 TB hot plus 1 TB cold, Studio $250 or $2,500 for 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold. Blocks beyond a plan are $40 per TB hot and $20 per TB cold, a month. Cold storage is on Max and Studio only.
Read the top row and the bottom row together
What to do with the answer
Three places: local disk,
cold, and where a client can click.
Local disks and RAID
The negative, the proxies, the render cache, the project. This is the cheapest byte you will ever own and the one your edit actually runs from. Uploading a full rushes set is the most expensive mistake on this page.
Cold storage
The graded master and the selects that made the cut: the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace. Half the hot rate, $20 per TB a month, encrypted at rest, available on Max and Studio. A cold master does not stream, embed or open in a review room until you bring it back.
Online, where people watch
One file per project: the export, at 100 to 200 Mb/s if you want it to hold up. The player streams the exact bytes uploaded with no transcode anywhere, so a 150 Mb/s export plays at 150 Mb/s. Views, viewers and uploads are not metered.
Two format rules decide what can live in the third column. Browser playback is H.264, HEVC and AV1, so those are the codecs that stream. ProRes and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed, which is why the master belongs in cold storage and the export belongs online. 8K plays when the viewer’s own hardware decodes it.
Camera formats are their own case. The macOS app plays R3D, BRAW and N-RAW natively. None of the three streams and none of them plays in a browser. For ARRIRAW, X-OCN and ProRes RAW the honest workflow is unchanged: finish to HEVC or ProRes, then upload. Uploads run up to 5 TB per file, subject to the storage available on your account, which on every plan is the tighter of the two limits.
The practical version of all of this is short. Work out the bitrate, divide by eight, multiply by sixty. Size the local disk for the negative plus the proxies plus the cache, not the negative alone. Send the master and the selects cold on the day the grade locks. Keep one export online, and stop paying online rates for six terabytes of things nobody is going to open. The rate cards and the hot and cold guide carry the cost side of the same arithmetic.
Questions
Frequently asked
How much storage does one minute of 4K video take?
Divide the bitrate in megabits per second by eight, then multiply by sixty, and you have megabytes per minute. A 20 Mb/s delivery export is 150 MB a minute. A 150 Mb/s HEVC master is 1.13 GB a minute. A UHD mastering codec in the ProRes 422 HQ class is around 6.6 GB a minute. All three are 4K.
How many hours of 4K fit on 1 TB?
At a 20 Mb/s delivery bitrate, about 111 hours. At a 150 Mb/s master bitrate, about 15 hours. At a UHD mastering codec around 880 Mb/s, about two and a half hours. The question has no single answer until you say which file you mean.
Does 4K take four times as much space as 1080p?
Only if you spend four times the bitrate on it, which nobody does at delivery. A 4K export at 20 Mb/s and a 1080p export at 20 Mb/s are exactly the same size. The 4K one just spends those bits across four times the pixels, which is why a starved 4K file can look worse than a well fed HD one.
Why is my camera's 4K file so much smaller than a ProRes file of the same shot?
Consumer cameras record long-GOP H.264 or HEVC, which describes most frames as changes from a neighbouring frame. Mastering codecs describe every frame in full so the file survives editing and grading. The second approach costs an order of magnitude more bytes on purpose.
What actually fills the drive on a shoot?
Not the film. The camera negative, the proxy set, the audio, the render cache, the graded master, the viewing export and the archive copy are seven different objects for one job. On a two-camera day the negative alone can be five terabytes, and the file the client eventually watches is under a hundredth of a percent of it.
How big can a single upload be here?
Up to 5 TB per file, subject to the storage available on your account. That ceiling is larger than any plan's storage, so in practice the account's remaining space is the real limit, not the per-file number.
Should I upload the ProRes master or the export?
The export, if the point is for someone to watch it. Browser playback is H.264, HEVC and AV1; ProRes and DNxHR are hosted for download, not streamed. The master belongs in cold storage next to the selects, where it costs half the hot rate and comes back when a re-edit is real.
Size the online copy, not the whole shoot
Only one file per project needs to be online: the export people watch. Lite is 100 GB at $9 a month, Pro 500 GB at $25, Max 1.5 TB hot plus 1 TB cold at $75. Views, viewers and uploads are not metered on any of them.
Sources
- 1.Apple Support: Apple ProRes, target data rates by format (fetched 9 September 2026; Apple publishes these figures at 1920x1080 and 29.97 fps)
- 2.uncompressed.io pricing, plan storage and per-terabyte blocks
- 3.uncompressed.io: the Vault, and the hot and cold storage each plan includes