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Hot vs cold storage for footage.
What re-hydration means, and what a year of work actually costs.

Every master you keep online forever is paid for forever. Cold storage is how a finished project stops costing hot-tier money without leaving the building. Here is how the two temperatures work here, the arithmetic for a real year of work, and how the same year prices out on tape and on the big clouds' archive tiers.

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Video hosting for filmmakers · 5 GB free · Paid plans from USD 9/month

By uncompressed.io · Updated September 2026

Two temperatures, one library

Hot is what you are using;
cold is what you are keeping.

The distinction is not about safety. Both copies are the file you uploaded, encrypted at rest. The difference is what the file can do right now, and what you pay while it can.

Hot

The living library. Streams at full bitrate, embeds, opens in the review room, takes comments, ships to clients. Every byte is ready to play the moment someone clicks, with unlimited views. Priced for that readiness.

Cold

The archive. The master is stored, encrypted, at half the hot rate, and it does nothing else: no stream, no embed, no review, until you bring it back. The delivered master and the selects that made the cut: the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace.

Re-hydration

Restoring requires available hot capacity and uses a monthly allowance of twice your archive capacity. Transfer time depends on file size and the transfer path; no fixed completion time is guaranteed.

The rule of thumb

The film your clients click stays hot, in a format and bitrate suited to their device and connection. The master it was cut from and the selects that made the cut go cold the day it is delivered. Everything else you shot stays on your local disks and RAID.

The browser archive route accepts up to 20 GiB per file. Larger transfers require a supported macOS workflow within its own limits. Hot capacity is released after the archive copy is verified and the library change is saved. Archived films must be restored before streaming, embedding or review. Restoring requires available hot capacity and uses a monthly allowance of twice your archive capacity. Transfer time depends on file size and the transfer path; no fixed completion time is guaranteed.

The arithmetic

One year of work,
hot, cold, and split.

Take a working shooter who finishes a project a month: a ProRes master of about 60 GB, a 150 Mbps viewing export of the same film at 11 GB, and 1.5 TB of camera rushes, of which the selects that made the cut are about 300 GB. Twelve of those is 720 GB of masters, 135 GB of exports, 3.6 TB of selects and 18 TB of rushes. The rushes already live on the local disks and RAID the edit ran from, the cheapest storage you own; the cloud’s job is the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace, plus the one file people click: 4.5 TB a year of exports, masters and selects. So the question is the temperature of that off-site set. A ProRes master in the hot library is a download, or download; not browser playback: browsers do not decode ProRes, so the file a client plays is the H.264 or HEVC export anyway.

Off-site set kept hot
Off-site set kept cold
The split (recommended)
Viewingexports(135 GB)
Hot
Cold: nothingstreams
Hot, on the plan:every film plays at 150 Mbps
ProResmasters(720 GB)
Hot: native playbackor download; not browser playback
Cold
Cold
Selects thatmade the cut(3.6 TB)
Hot
Cold
Cold
All otherrushes(14.4 TB)
Local disksand RAID
Local disksand RAID
Local disksand RAID
Blocks pastthe plan
4 hot blocks past the500 GB included: $200 a month
2 cold blocks past the2.5 TB included: $50 a month
2 cold blocks past the2.5 TB included: $50 a month
Monthlyat year end(Max, $99)
$299
$149
$149
What stillstreams
Every film
Nothing untilre-hydrated
Every film,at 150 Mbps
Monthlyafter threeyears
$749:13 hot blocks
$374:11 cold blocks
$374: 11 cold blocks,hot still inside the plan
Re-hydrationheadroom
n/a
9 TB a month
9 TB a month

Every column keeps the full rushes on local disks and RAID; the columns differ only in the temperature of the off-site set, 4.5 TB a year of exports, masters and selects. Max plan, monthly: 500 GB hot and 2.5 TB cold included, then $50 per TB hot and $25 per TB cold a month, billed in whole terabytes. A ten-minute film: the ProRes 422 HQ master in UHD is about 55 GB at 24p (Apple's data-rate table gives 318 GB an hour), rounded to 60 GB here; the same film exported at 150 Mbps is 11 GB. Rushes assume about 1.5 TB per project, roughly five hours of ProRes 422 HQ in UHD or a couple of hours of camera RAW, with the selects that made the cut taken as a fifth of that; scale both to your codec and your shooting ratio. Re-hydration headroom is twice the cold pool, the included 2.5 terabytes plus the blocks.

Two things the table hides. First, hot never stops growing: the same off-site set kept hot is buying thirteen hot blocks by year three, $749 a month, while the split’s hot side is still 405 GB, inside the plan for three years; its cold side grows by about 4.3 TB a year, roughly $108 a month more each year. Second, all-cold saves nothing over the split, and nothing plays: a client who asks for the link in month nine waits for a re-hydration. The split is the same cold bill with every film playing at a bitrate about seven times the 4K ceiling of the best streaming platforms, the master and the selects off-site for the day a re-edit is real, and the other fourteen terabytes where they already are, on the RAID.

Your own numbers

Size it from
what you shoot.

Size your hot and cold libraries, then include the archive requirement and team seats to compare the full configuration at current list prices.

Hot / Live storage

How much unlimited streaming storage you need:

You need

41.9 GB

Cold / Archive storage

How much archive storage you need:

You need

41.9 GB

Keeping the full RAW rushes runs ~25×: 1.02 TB.

Lite

$99.00 USD / year + $0.00 USD / month

Additional 1 TB blocks: 0 hot · 0 cold · 0 extra seats

Capacity with these add-ons: 100 GB hot · 100 GB cold · 1 seats

Caption generation: 600 min / calendar month

Lowest list-price configuration for the entered requirements, excluding tax and promotions. Storage extras remain monthly; seats follow the base plan cycle. Caption needs may justify a different plan. This estimate does not change your subscription.

File sizes and plan capacities use the same binary units as the catalogue (GB = 2^30 bytes, TB = 2^40 bytes), with rounded display values. Recommendations compare exact bytes. File-size estimates exclude container overhead; leave room for it.

HOT is your library for streaming, client review and sharing. Compatible codecs, devices and sufficient connection speed are required. Streaming has no per-view or bandwidth overage charges.

COLD is the archive for finished projects, encrypted at rest, at a lower cost. Keep your own copy too; this is an archive, not a backup service. Restore into available hot capacity before playback or review. Completion depends on file size, transfer path and verification; no fixed time is guaranteed. Re-hydration allowance: 2× your cold storage per month. On paid plans, a finished edit can also go to cold straight from the editor as a project pack, each file restorable on its own.

When to move what

Selects go cold
the day the grade locks.

1

During the edit: cuts and versions hot, rushes on the RAID

Versions, review cuts, the review room. This is the month the file earns its rate. The camera originals stay on the local disks and RAID the edit runs from; they are never uploaded wholesale.

2

Grade locked: selects to cold

The selects that made the cut are the off-site copy, about a fifth of what was shot on most jobs. Move them to cold the day the grade is approved. The rest of the rushes stay on the RAID.

3

Delivered: a compatible viewing export stays hot

Choose an H.264 or HEVC viewing export suited to the recipient’s device and connection and keep it hot. High-bitrate examples require enough sustained bandwidth; test playback first. The ProRes master joins the selects in cold the same day; browsers cannot play it, so it was never the file being clicked.

4

A year on: review, then decide

If nobody has played a viewing export in twelve months, it can go cold too. If a re-edit is likely, leave it. The dashboard shows last-played dates so the decision is not a guess.

The mistake to avoid

Two of them. Keeping the 60 GB ProRes master hot because it feels safer, and archiving the 11 GB export to save a dollar: backwards, because the export is the only one of the two that plays, and the master is the one that can be restored when a re-edit is needed, subject to available capacity and transfer time. And uploading every rushes drive: the RAID you already own is the cheapest byte there is, and the cloud copy only needs what a reshoot could not replace, the master and the selects.

Steps two and three, from inside the editor

Project archives do the selects and the master in one pass, read off the timeline rather than picked by hand. With the timeline open in DaVinci Resolve, the sequence open in Premiere Pro, or an XML exported from Final Cut Pro, one pack goes straight into your cold pool on any paid plan: every clip the timeline uses, whole and untouched, the project file, and the finished master, nothing re-encoded and nothing passing through hot. The pack is checked against your free cold space before a byte uploads, and an interrupted run resumes from the last part that made it. On the dashboard each file is its own item: download it straight from cold, or re-hydrate it into hot inside the same monthly allowance. The project archives guide covers the three editors.

The same year, elsewhere

Tape, the big clouds,
and where the fees hide.

Cold storage is not a new idea. Tape has done it for decades and the big clouds sell archive tiers at a fraction of a cent per gigabyte. Both work. Both charge in places a filmmaker does not expect, and the sticker price is never the number that matters. The scenario below is the recommended cold set from the table above: 4.3 TB of masters and selects kept for a year, with one project, 360 GB, brought back once.

LTO tape

The cheapest bytes on earth once the drive is paid for, and the slowest to get back: a drive on a desk, a cartridge to find, a linear read to wait through, and a generation cycle that turns today's cartridges into tomorrow's migration project. Ideal for the copy nobody opens. Useless for the link a client wants today.

Big-cloud archive tiers

Storage at a fraction of a cent per gigabyte, then a retrieval fee per gigabyte, a minimum storage period billed whether you keep the file or not, a restore window measured in hours, and egress per gigabyte to get the file onto your machine. Every one of those is a line on the bill that a monthly rate here already includes.

Here

Half the hot rate, encrypted at rest, restored within a monthly allowance of twice your cold pool, with completion time depending on the file and transfer path. Storage extras renew monthly. It is not the cheapest byte: the clouds' deep tiers store the same terabyte for a dollar a month. It is the cheapest byte that is still inside your library, one switch from hot.

uncompressed.io
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Azure Archive
Google Cloud Archive
LTO-9 tape
Storagelist rate
$25 per TBa month
$0.0036 per GB:$3.60 per TB a month
$0.00099 per GB:$0.99 per TB a month
$0.00099 per GB:$0.99 per TB a month
$0.0012 per GiB:about $1.20 per TB a month
$90 to $102 per18 TB cartridge, once
4.3 TB of mastersand selectsfor 12 months
$1,500 at list;$600 on Max, $0 on Studio
$187
$51
$51
$62
$204 for two cartridges,plus a $6,399 to $8,499 drive
Minimumstay
None
90 days
180 days
180 days
365 days
None
Fees to bringback one project(360 GB)
$0
$3.60 standard or $0 bulk,plus $23 egress
$7.20 standard or $0.90 bulk,plus $23 egress
$7.20 standard or $36 priority,plus $23 egress
$18 retrieval,plus $43 egress
$0
Wait beforethe download
No fixed completion timeTransfer and verification time vary
3 to 5 hours standard,5 to 12 hours bulk
Up to 12 hours standard,up to 48 hours bulk
Up to 15 hours standard for objectsunder 10 GB; priority is capped at10 GiB an hour per account
None: milliseconds,then the download
Find and mount the cartridge,then about 20 minutes of linearread at 300 MB/s
Restoreallowance
Twice your cold poola month: 10 TB here
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
Whatever the drivecan read
What it takesto run
A switch inyour library
A bucket, lifecycle rules,restore jobs, a bill to read
A bucket, lifecycle rules,restore jobs, a bill to read
A container, tier rules,rehydration jobs, a bill to read
A bucket, lifecycle rules,a bill to read
A drive, LTFS software, a shelf,and a migration each generation:LTO-9 reads LTO-8 and LTO-9 only
The year,with onerestore
$1,500 at list;$600 on Max
$214
$82
$81
$123
$6,603 the first year;a cartridge pair holdsfour such years

List prices in US dollars for US regions, fetched 1 September 2026 and rounded. The clouds bill in binary gigabytes, which makes their figures about 7% lower than the decimal ones shown. Egress assumes the first 100 GB a month free on AWS and Azure, then the first-tier internet rate ($0.09, $0.087 and $0.12 per GB). Here, 4.3 TB is five whole blocks at list; 2.5 TB is included on Max and 8 TB on Studio, which brings the year to $600 on Max and nothing on Studio. Tape prices are the lowest dealer prices seen that day, before tax; full-height LTO-9 drives are rated at 400 MB/s native, the desktop Thunderbolt units priced here at 300 MB/s.

Read the bottom row honestly. If you are willing to run a bucket, the deep tiers store the same terabyte for a dollar a month, and a year of masters and selects with one restore costs about what a single month costs here. What you are paying for here is that the archive lives inside the same library as the hot copy: no console, no lifecycle rule, no restore job, no egress line, and a master that is back in the review room the moment the copy verifies, inside an allowance you never have to think about. That is worth $25 a terabyte to a studio whose editor’s time costs more than its storage. It is not worth it for an archive nobody will touch for five years; for that, tape or a deep tier is the right answer, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The asymmetry runs the other way on the hot side. S3 Standard is $0.023 per GB a month, $23 a terabyte, but every play from it is egress at $0.09 per GB: twenty full plays of a 60 GB master is 1.2 TB out, $108, before a player, a review room or a share page exists. Hot here is $50 per TB with unlimited plays. That is why the split works: keep the hot copy where plays are free, and keep the cold copy where the byte is half price and still one switch from hot.

Do not confuse a cache with long-term storage

An application cache helps playback; it is not the same as an independent project archive or a storage-tier transfer. Keep the project’s deliverables and review record in your retention plan rather than relying on whatever media remains cached on one Mac.

If an external drive holds working media, verify that it is connected before the session and that the required files are present. Choosing a new cache folder does not establish that older files were migrated or independently backed up.

Offline video review · Video approval report pdf

Questions

Frequently asked

What exactly happens when I move a master to cold?

Hot capacity is released after the archive copy is verified and the library change is saved. Archived films must be restored before streaming, embedding or review.

What should the hot copy of a delivered film be?

Keep the export your clients need to watch in hot storage. H.264 with AAC is a broadly compatible choice; HEVC and AV1 depend on the device. Choose a bitrate their connection can sustain. You can add a separate matching review copy for a demanding original; both files count toward storage. Keep active links hot.

How long does re-hydration take?

Restoring requires available hot capacity and uses a monthly allowance of twice your archive capacity. Transfer time depends on file size and the transfer path; no fixed completion time is guaranteed.

Is there a limit on how much I can re-hydrate?

Yes: twice your cold storage per calendar month, resetting on the 1st. With 1 TB of cold storage you can bring back 2 TB in a month; with 4 TB, 8 TB. It is generous by design, but it is a real cap, and the dashboard shows how much of it you have used.

Should I put all my rushes in cold?

No. Keep every card and drive on local disks and a RAID: that is the cheapest storage you own and the one your edit runs from. Cold is the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace, the delivered master and the selects that made the cut. On most jobs that is about a fifth of what was shot: 4.3 TB a year of cold blocks, $50 a month at year end on Max, against $200 a month for the same set kept hot.

Can I archive a 400 GB camera master?

The browser archive route accepts up to 20 GiB per file. Larger files need a supported macOS transfer workflow within its limits and your capacity. Upload limits and archive-transfer limits are separate; check with support before planning a 400 GB archive move.

What if I downgrade to a plan with a smaller cold pool?

Lite includes 100 GB of archive capacity and Pro 500 GB, and either can add monthly archive blocks. Your remaining allowance must cover stored files before a reduction can complete. Check capacity and scheduled billing changes before switching.

Which plans have cold storage?

Max includes 500 GB hot and 2.5 TB archive; Studio includes 1 TB hot and 8 TB archive. Archive extras cost $25 per TB per month on any paid plan, including Lite and Pro. Storage extras stay monthly even with an annual base plan. Free has no archive capacity.

Size it, then move it

Max includes 500 GB hot and 2.5 TB archive; Studio includes 1 TB hot and 8 TB archive. Archive extras cost $25 per TB per month on any paid plan, including Lite and Pro. Storage extras stay monthly even with an annual base plan. Hot capacity is released after the archive copy is verified and the library change is saved. Archived films must be restored before streaming, embedding or review.

See the rate cards

Sources

  1. 1.uncompressed.io pricing and storage blocks
  2. 2.uncompressed.io plans: included storage and seats
  3. 3.Vimeo Help Center: guidelines for determining playback resolution, 4K H.264 maximum of 22 Mbps (fetched 2 September 2026)
  4. 4.Amazon S3 storage classes: Glacier tiers, minimum storage durations, overhead per object
  5. 5.Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes: Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB-month
  6. 6.Amazon S3 pricing: Standard storage, data transfer out and the 100 GB free allowance
  7. 7.AWS Price List, Amazon S3, us-east-1 (Glacier storage and retrieval rates, published 31 August 2026)
  8. 8.Amazon S3 documentation: archive retrieval options and times
  9. 9.Amazon S3 documentation: storage classes and minimum storage durations
  10. 10.Azure Retail Prices API: Archive storage, retrieval and priority retrieval meters, East US LRS
  11. 11.Azure documentation: access tiers and the 180-day archive early-deletion period
  12. 12.Azure documentation: rehydrating from the archive tier, priorities, times and the 10 GiB-per-hour cap
  13. 13.Azure bandwidth pricing: internet egress from North America
  14. 14.Google Cloud Storage pricing: Archive storage, retrieval, operations and egress
  15. 15.Google Cloud Storage documentation: storage classes, 365-day minimum, millisecond access
  16. 16.LTO Program: LTO-9 capacity and transfer rate
  17. 17.LTO Program: generation compatibility (LTO-9 reads and writes LTO-8 and LTO-9 only)
  18. 18.BackupWorks: Quantum LTO-9 cartridge price
  19. 19.Tape4Backup: LTO-9 cartridge prices (August 2026 increase noted)
  20. 20.LTO World: OWC Archive Pro LTO-9 Thunderbolt drive price and rated speed
  21. 21.Maxx Digital: mLogic mTape LTO-9 Thunderbolt drive price and rated speed
  22. 22.Apple ProRes white paper (April 2022): target data rates by format and frame rate
  23. 23.Blackmagic Design: URSA Mini Pro 12K technical specifications, Blackmagic RAW data rates

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