The answer depends on what you shoot, how you shoot, and how honest you are about what you keep. A YouTube creator working in H.265 and a commercial DP shooting RED 8K live in different storage realities. But both of them are probably keeping more footage than they need.
Here's how to figure out what you actually require -- and how much of your current storage you might be able to reclaim.
Camera Format Data Rates
Not all footage is created equal. A minute of video can be 100 MB or 1.5 GB depending on the codec, resolution, and compression. Here's what the major formats look like in practice:
| Format | Resolution | Approx. Size per Minute |
|---|---|---|
| H.265 (HEVC) | 4K | ~100 MB |
| H.264 | 4K | ~150 MB |
| ProRes 422 | 4K | ~400 MB |
| ProRes 422 HQ | 4K | ~600 MB |
| ProRes 4444 | 4K | ~1.2 GB |
| BRAW (Blackmagic RAW) | 6K | ~800 MB |
| RED R3D | 8K | ~1.5 GB |
| ARRIRAW | 4.5K | ~2 GB |
These are approximate. Actual sizes vary with frame rate, sensor crop, and compression settings. But they give you the right order of magnitude.
The takeaway: shooting compressed H.265 gives you roughly 15x more recording time per terabyte than shooting ARRIRAW. That's not a quality judgment -- it's a storage planning fact.
Project Size by Genre
Raw data rates only tell part of the story. Total project size depends on how much you shoot relative to what you deliver.
30-second commercial: 1-2 shoot days, multicam, high shooting ratio. Expect 200-500 GB of source media. Deliverables are maybe 2 GB.
10-minute YouTube video: Single camera, screen recordings, B-roll grabs. Typically 200 GB to 1 TB depending on format. The final export is under 5 GB.
Corporate training series: 10-20 episodes, interview setups, screen captures, stock footage. 2-5 TB total. Each finished episode might be 1-2 GB.
Feature documentary: 50-200 hours of interview and verité footage shot over months or years. 5-20 TB of source. The finished film fits on a Blu-ray.
Narrative feature: Scripted, controlled shooting ratios, but high-end formats. 2-10 TB of camera originals depending on format and shoot length.
Notice the pattern. Source media is always orders of magnitude larger than deliverables. That gap is where storage costs live.
The 3-5x Import Multiplier
Here's the number most editors don't talk about: you import three to five times more footage into your NLE than ends up on any timeline.
Think about how you actually work. You ingest everything from the shoot. You import stock footage you're auditioning. You bring in music tracks to try against the cut. You download graphics packages, sound effects libraries, alternate takes from a pickup day.
Some of that makes the cut. Most doesn't.
On a 1 TB project, the footage that's actually on a timeline might total 200-300 GB. The remaining 700-800 GB is material that was considered and rejected. It was part of the process, but it's not part of the product.
Multiply this across every project on your drive. If you've got 4 TB of active projects, somewhere between 1.2 TB and 2.4 TB is probably footage that never made any timeline. That's not a guess -- it's the consistent range editors see when they actually audit their drives.
Use the storage calculator to see what that unused storage is costing you monthly, whether you're paying for local drives or cloud storage.
What's Actually Reclaimable
Not everything unused should be deleted. Some footage you keep for insurance -- the client might come back for revisions. Some you keep because the project is still in progress.
But completed projects? Delivered work from six, twelve, eighteen months ago? The footage that didn't make the cut on a project you delivered last year is almost certainly safe to remove.
A realistic reclamation target for most editors:
- Active projects: 0% -- don't touch anything you're currently cutting.
- Recently delivered (1-3 months): Remove unused cautiously. Client might still request changes.
- Delivered and archived (3+ months): Unused footage is very likely safe to remove. Keep what's on timelines, delete the rest.
- Cache, previews, peak files: Almost always safe to delete. Premiere regenerates these on demand.
The sweet spot is completed projects with large shooting ratios. A documentary editor with 10 TB of source footage and a 90-minute finished film is probably sitting on 6-8 TB of reclaimable media.
Planning Your Next Storage Purchase
Before you buy another drive or upgrade your cloud plan, do the math in two directions.
First, estimate what you need going forward. Take your typical project size (use the format table above), multiply by the number of concurrent projects you run, and add 20% headroom. That's your working storage requirement.
Second, audit what you already have. How much of your current drive is footage from completed projects that never made a timeline? The storage calculator can help you estimate the cost of keeping it versus the cost of new storage.
Most editors who actually run the numbers find they can push their next drive purchase out by six months or more just by cleaning up what they've already got. Clip Sweeper makes that audit automatic -- point it at your project drive and it tells you exactly which files are on timelines and which aren't, across every project. It's a faster answer than a spreadsheet and a more reliable one than guessing.