So I just bought the Pocket 3 creator bundle and I’m planning to buy the SanDisk Extreme 1TB microsd card. I want to know how many hours of footage will 1080p at 24fps get me. I tried asking ChatGPT and DeepSeek but ended with three different answers.
ChatGPT said that at 24 Mbps, I’ll have an approximate storage of 92.6 hours (response 1) or at 10 Mbps, I’ll have an approximate storage of 222 hours (response 2).
DeepSeek said at 9 Mbps, I’ll have an approximate storage of 29.3 hours.
So basically, I have no idea where they got their bitrates from, and I want to know if there’s a rough estimate on how many hours 1TB will give me.
You can find the bitrate specs here. For what it’s worth, most people don’t buy the highest capacity SD cards because there’s a chance they fail, and you’d rather be out 128 or 256GB worth of video than 1TB. You end up carrying more cards, but it’s worth the peace of mind.
Kiernan said: @Soren
Fail, as in they were faulty from the start, or like file corruption?
Corrupted. Personally, I wouldn’t want all my footage on one card, so I tend to back it up in three places when I get back from shooting. I never need more than 128 for one day of shooting, but I digress.
There are 1,000,000 megabytes in a terabyte. Bitrate is hard to estimate, but I’d say 25 Mbps is a solid conservative estimate. It depends on compression. Then divide by 60 to get minutes, and divide by 60 again to get hours.
@Bennet
I think you’d set it to about 12 megabit per second with 1080p24fps, so about 16 times less than you calculated. Video frames typically take less storage because of compression. Not every picture is stored as a full picture but rather as the difference to the last one.
I personally use a preset of 8-12 Mbps on my rerender preset with FFMPEG when I want to save bytes while storing. Also, I’m keeping them at FHD 30FPS, close to your preset.
I guess the SD card has 1TB (Terabyte) and not 1TBit (1 Terabit). So it’s
1000000TB * 8bit (every byte is 8bit) = 8000000mbit
8000000mbit / 12mbps (12 megabit per second) = 666666,666s
666666,666 / 3600 (3600s/h) = 185h
This leads to the conclusion that you’d have 185 hours of video to store. This sounds fairly true, as my drone, which uses 80 Mbps with 4K60fps and 512GB storage, can hold about 12 hours of video.
Nope, I wrote a batch script to rerender and downscale all drone footage after I load it to my PC. Videos I want to edit or something stay the same resolution. This way, I can always look back, and it doesn’t look too bad.
A 512GB card, after formatting, has 476.8GB of space available. At 1080/24, that card provides a little more than 34 hours of recording at “Standard” bitrate configured in the camera settings. With “High” bitrate, the recording time drops to 29 hours and 41 minutes.
For a 1TB card, you can double that to get a rough estimate.
68 hours with “Standard” bitrate and 60 hours 20 minutes for “High” bitrate.
So I have a 512GB card in mine with about 450GB free atm, at 1080p24fps it’s telling me I have just over 24 hours of record time available. This is in the HEVC compression codec. A full 512GB card should give you about 30 hours of footage.
If you shoot a lot of videos and need as much space as possible, it’s better to get 2 512GB cards rather than one 1TB card. This is in case your card fails, you don’t want all of your footage being only on one card.