Video Storage Calculator — the nuance that decides whether this number is trustworthy

You need one number before you press Record: how many gigabytes will this session actually use? Not a forum guess — the byte math your recorder and your vault already use. This page gives you per-minute, per-hour, per-recording, per-week, per-month and per-year totals from bitrate, audio tracks and schedule, with dual-canvas honesty and plan fits.

What the result actually means

GB = (video Mbps + audio Mbps) × 0.45 × hours. A 90-minute podcast at 6.16 Mbps is 4.16 GB. A 4-hour gaming stream at 12.32 Mbps is 22.18 GB. At 18.16 Mbps (1440p60) the same 4 hours is 32.69 GB. Change one slider — add a track, go 60 FPS, switch to 4K — and you see the cascade: per-minute, per-hour, per-week, per-month, per-year, and which 256 GB / 512 GB / 1 TB / 2 TB drive fills first. We also show which WeaverClip vault (Free 5 GB, Creator 75 GB, Pro 150 GB, Studio 1000 GB, overage $0.04/GB-month) holds the monthly total, single- and dual-canvas. Assumptions are explicit: decimal GB (1 GB = 1e9 bytes, matching Stripe), 0.45 constant, CBR average. For CQP/VBR add 15–20% headroom for spikes.

How it actually works

Decimal gigabytes because the vault does. 1 Mbps = 0.45 GB/h. Add video + audio Mbps, ×0.45, ×hours. Audio matters: 6 Mbps + 160 kbps = 6.16 Mbps, 5% more than video alone. Over 100 h/month that 5% is 13 GB. Two tracks add 0.144 GB/h — 10 GB/month hidden in video-only calculators. We use decimal, not binary GiB — binary would make every number 7.37% smaller and hide overage. For dual recording we double honestly: 6+6 Mbps = 12 Mbps → 5.4 GB/h, not 2.7. Most sites quote one stream; we show both columns before the invoice.

Three real creator examples — not toy numbers

Note for video storage calculator: The following three scenarios are hypothetical examples (illustrative, not sourced case studies) for this specific tool — they show the shape of real usage but are not measured lab cases with sourced files. They show the shape of real schedules but are not measured lab cases with sourced files. Where we cite a measured case, we say so and give the method.

90-min podcast, 1080p30, 6 Mbps + 160 kbps, 2×/week: 4.16 GB/ep → 8.32 GB/week → ~36 GB/month. Fits Creator 75 GB with 39 GB left; dual-canvas 72 GB still fits Creator. Free holds one episode, not the schedule.

4-hour livestream, 1080p60 gaming 12 Mbps + 2 tracks, 3×/week: 4 h × 12.32 Mbps ×0.45 =22.18 GB/stream →66.5 GB/week →288 GB/month. Needs Studio or Pro + overage. Drop to 8 Mbps (14.8 GB/stream →192 GB/month) still needs Studio but you can test with Pro + overage first.

8-hour 1440p60 18 Mbps VOD: 65.38 GB for one file — exceeds Free 13×. At 6 Mbps 1080p30 it would be 21.6 GB — still 4× Free. ‘Unlimited hours’ without a GB number is fiction: one VOD can exceed a monthly vault.

Deep guide — what studios do differently

Studios roll: 60-min segments, checksums, second recorder. Copy it: in OBS set Filename Formatting to %CCYY-%MM-%DD_%hh-%mm-%ss and keep MKV. With WeaverClip each segment is a file for ~60 seconds before verified delete. Without it, roll manually every hour. The calculator’s 90% clock tells you when to roll: if you hit 90% at 3:42 a.m., roll at 3:00 a.m. and upload the closed segment while the next records. Second habit is retention math: Free 5 GB ≈1.8 h single-canvas, Creator 75 GB ≈27 h, Pro 150 GB ≈54 h, Studio 1000 GB ≈370 h (dual is half). For a 12-hour subathon you plan 32–65 GB, not “12 hours”.

Troubleshooting — when the number looks wrong

• Says 2 GB but file is 5 GB: You used CQP, not CBR. Treat result as average and add 15% headroom for gaming.
• Monthly doubled: You added a second track or went 1080p60 — 60 FPS adds ~50%; second track adds 0.07 GB/h.
• 4K blocky at 8 Mbps: 4K needs 25+ Mbps. Drop to 1080p before starving bitrate.
• Finder says 200 GB free but calculator says 3 h: Purgeable space — macOS counts iCloud purgeable as free until you need it contiguous.
• External 0 bytes free but shows free: exFAT 4 GB per-file limit.

Decision guide — what to do next

If you fit with 30% headroom, keep settings. If you fit only at 90%, treat as not fitting — motion spikes 10–20%. If you don’t fit, lower bitrate, raise vault (75→150→1000, $0.04/GB), or segment-and-verify (WeaverClip streams 1-min segments, verified before delete). For most 4–8 h streamers, verified segments are cheaper than a new drive and safer than one long file.

How this connects to WeaverClip — without bullshit

If this says your stream is ~22 GB, WeaverClip can upload each 1-minute segment as the next minute records and queue local delete only after byte-count + MD5 verify. Gaps are painted, clip suggestions are gap-aware. That is the difference between a number and a guarantee.

FAQ

Need signup? No — runs in browser. How exact? ±2% CBR, wider CQP. Add 15% headroom for gaming. Why 0.45? Exact unit conversion; 0.5 overstates 11%. Dual-canvas double? Yes if you keep both — 6+6 Mbps = 5.4 GB/h. Hit limit? Vault is ceiling, hard limit 2×; overage $0.04/GB; past limit uploads pause, files stay local. Re-check when? When bitrate, res, FPS, codec or schedule changes.

Appendix — second-order effects

Muxing overhead 1–2% decides whether 90% is truly 90%. APFS clones and Time Machine snapshots make Finder optimistic. Habit is the biggest variable: toggle 60 FPS and forget to re-check — that one toggle adds 50% silently. We put ‘what if’ rows under every result so you feel the delta before you press Record. Per-segment ordering (verify → delete) means interrupted network does not leave you with ‘maybe the cloud has it’.

Reading the result for your actual plan — Free, Creator, Pro, Studio

Free: 5 GB vault, 1 processing hour total, 6 renders total, 30-day retention for that first file. At 6.16 Mbps that is 1.8 hours single-canvas, 0.9 hours dual. One 90-minute podcast at 4.16 GB fits Free with ~0.8 GB left; two podcasts in the same month do not. That is why Free is a trial for one file, not a schedule.

Creator ($15): 75 GB, 4 hours processing, 100 renders, 180-day retention. At 6.16 Mbps, 75 GB is ~27 hours single-canvas, ~13.5 hours dual. A 2×/week podcast (36 GB/month) fits with 39 GB headroom for clips. A 3×/week 4-hour gaming schedule at 12.32 Mbps (288 GB/month) does not — you will need Pro or Studio, or you will need to lower to 8 Mbps and accept softer motion.

Creator Pro ($29): 150 GB, 8 hours, 300 renders. At 6.16 Mbps, ~54 hours single, ~27 hours dual. The same 3×/week gaming schedule at 8 Mbps (192 GB/month) still exceeds 150 GB, but overage at $0.04/GB makes Pro + 42 GB overage = $29 + $1.68 for that month, cheaper than Studio for a test month. At 12.32 Mbps, 150 GB is 27 hours single, 13.5 dual — still short for that schedule, but you can process 8 hours of the 12 you stored and keep the rest for next month.

Studio ($129): 1000 GB, 70 hours, 2000 renders. At 6.16 Mbps, ~370 hours single, ~185 dual. Even a 40-hour/month gaming schedule at 12.32 Mbps (216 GB) fits with 784 GB left. Studio is for daily long-form, archives, and teams.

Hard limit is 2× vault: Free 10 GB, Creator 150 GB, Pro 300 GB, Studio 2000 GB. Past hard limit uploads pause and files stay local — we never auto-delete to make quota. Overage is $0.04/GB-month and $0.05/render. That is why the calculator shows both “vault” and “hard limit” — the ceiling and the emergency rail.

Why we show per-year and why it matters for buying a drive

Per-month is for billing. Per-year is for buying a drive. A Creator on a 36 GB/month podcast schedule will use 432 GB/year. A 1 TB drive holds ~2.3 years of that schedule single-canvas, ~1.1 years dual. A 2 TB drive holds ~4.6 years single, ~2.3 dual. For gaming at 288 GB/month, a 1 TB drive is 3.4 months single, 1.7 dual. That is why streamers who keep archives buy 2 TB or 4 TB, not 512 GB, and why they ask “how much does this cost on WeaverClip vs a drive I replace every year?” The calculator answers both: the GB/month tells you the vault, the GB/year tells you the drive.

The failure modes you only learn after a full disk

Finder’s “Available: 400 GB” may include 60 GB purgeable. df -h in Terminal shows the real contiguous free. An exFAT drive will refuse a 6 GB file even with 400 GB free because the per-file limit is 4 GB. A network mount will appear to save then silently fail on flush. A Downloads folder on iCloud will appear to save then purge. We check none of those for you — we tell you the GB and assume you checked the path. The troubleshooting section lists them because they are the three reasons “calculator said 3 hours but OBS stopped at 40 minutes.”

Appendix — what to verify before you trust “free space”

On macOS, open Finder → Apple Menu → About This Mac → More Info → Storage → Settings and look at “Available” vs “Purgeable.” Or run df -h / and df -h /Volumes/YourDrive in Terminal. The number without “purgeable” is the one to enter. On Windows, right-click Drive → Properties. On Linux, df -h and lsblk. For the drive you record to, also check filesystem: APFS or NTFS is fine; exFAT is not for files >4 GB; FAT32 is not for long recordings at all. For the path, check that it is not inside a sync folder (Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive) that may move or deduplicate the file while OBS writes. Those three checks take 30 seconds and prevent the 0-byte case that no checker can recover. The appendix is not filler — it is the second question you didn’t know to ask until you had already learned the first one the hard way.

Bitrate vs quality — the tradeoff you actually feel

At 1080p30, 3 Mbps looks soft on text and faces, 6 Mbps is the sweet spot for talking heads and slides, 8 Mbps handles normal motion, 12 Mbps is needed for high-motion gaming, and 16–25 Mbps is where 1440p and 4K stop blocking on gradients and confetti. Those numbers are not arbitrary — they are where H.264 at x264 medium or VideoToolbox balanced stops showing macroblocking on a 1080p display at 1:1.

H.265 (HEVC) cuts ~40% at the same quality but costs CPU; on Apple Silicon VideoToolbox HEVC is efficient, on Windows you need a modern GPU or you will drop frames. AV1 cuts ~50% but needs even newer hardware; many creators try AV1 for the smaller file, see encoder overload, and switch back to H.264 with a slightly lower bitrate — a net win. The calculator lets you feel that trade: set your codec, then slide Mbps and watch GB/h and the “per-month” row. If your CPU is at 70% in OBS stats, that is the signal to drop codec or resolution before you drop bitrate so low that text smears.

For archiving, prefer CQP around 20 (balanced) or 23 (small). CQP varies with motion — a static slide at CQP 23 may be 2 Mbps, gaming at the same CQP may be 12 Mbps — so the calculator’s CBR average is a planning number, not a promise. Add headroom for CQP: if the calculator says 4.16 GB for CQP 6 Mbps average, budget 4.8 GB for gaming. That headroom is why professionals keep 30% free and why the decision guide says “fits at 90% = not fitting.”

Color and keyframe matter less for size but matter for quality: 4:2:0, 8-bit, keyframe 2 seconds is standard. Longer keyframes (4–8 s) save a few percent but hurt seeking and recovery — we recommend 2 s for creators who care about recoverability and editing. Audio: 160 kbps AAC stereo at 48 kHz is the sweet spot; 320 kbps doubles audio size for little audible gain, 96 kbps saves 0.03 GB/h but risks sibilance. Those are the second and third toggles to try before you starve video bitrate.

The studio habit is to record a 10-second test at your planned settings, check OBS stats (CPU, dropped frames, bitrate), then run the calculator with that exact Mbps. That test plus the calculator is more predictive than any forum table because it measures your scene, your encoder, and your motion — not an average.

How this page stays honest when plans change

Plan allowances live in lib/product/billing-catalog.json, which Stripe and this calculator both read. When a price moves, the math moves. There is no hand-edited “Creator is 75 GB until we update the blog post” — it is one edit to the catalog. That is why the “What fits” badges on this page always match pricing and why the overage math ($0.04/GB-month, $0.05/render) is not a copy.

Competitor pricing is different: we do not hard-code OpusClip credits in article text. The OpusClip Cost Calculator reads a versioned dataset with verified_at and source_url and stamps “Pricing checked: 2026-08-17.” That stamp is why you can trust the side-by-side. If OpusClip is cheaper for a short-source, many-clip workload, we say so.

What to back up first when you are over

If you are over vault, do not delete randomly. Sort by size and by keep value. In WeaverClip, sort vault by GB, keep the masters that have transcripts and clip suggestions (they have search value), and consider deleting the vertical master if you kept both canvases and can re-render vertical later from the landscape master. Or keep both masters but process only half the hours this month — storage is the ceiling, processing hours pause, they never bill. That is a lever no per-minute pricing gives you: you can keep the file and wait for renewal.

If you are over on a local drive, move the closed segment that is already verified in R2, not the segment that is still recording. The helper’s per-segment state tells you which is which: verified → safe to delete locally, uploading → wait, buffered → uploading next, gap → keep and retry. Deleting a verified segment frees the exact GB the calculator predicted, so your next “per-month” row updates predictably.

The 30-second preflight, revisited with real numbers

Before every long session, enter: video Mbps from OBS → Output → Recording, audio kbps × tracks, today’s free space from df -h, session length, weekly cadence. Read per-recording GB, per-month GB, and hard-limit GB. If per-month is 36 GB and you are on Creator 75 GB, you have 39 GB for clips and headroom — go. If per-month is 72 GB dual-canvas, you have 3 GB left — lower to single canvas or keep 1080p30. If per-month is 288 GB on a 1 TB studio schedule, you have 712 GB left — go, but set a 90% alarm at 900 GB. That 30-second ritual is the cheapest insurance you can buy.

Bitrate vs quality — the tradeoff you actually feel

At 1080p30, 3 Mbps looks soft on text and faces, 6 Mbps is the sweet spot for talking heads and slides, 8 Mbps handles normal motion, 12 Mbps is needed for high-motion gaming, and 16–25 Mbps is where 1440p and 4K stop blocking on gradients and confetti. Those numbers are not arbitrary — they are where H.264 at x264 medium or VideoToolbox balanced stops showing macroblocking on a 1080p display at 1:1.

H.265 (HEVC) cuts ~40% at the same quality but costs CPU; on Apple Silicon VideoToolbox HEVC is efficient, on Windows you need a modern GPU or you will drop frames. AV1 cuts ~50% but needs even newer hardware; many creators try AV1 for the smaller file, see encoder overload, and switch back to H.264 with a slightly lower bitrate — a net win. The calculator lets you feel that trade: set your codec, then slide Mbps and watch GB/h and the “per-month” row. If your CPU is at 70% in OBS stats, that is the signal to drop codec or resolution before you drop bitrate so low that text smears.

For archiving, prefer CQP around 20 (balanced) or 23 (small). CQP varies with motion — a static slide at CQP 23 may be 2 Mbps, gaming at the same CQP may be 12 Mbps — so the calculator’s CBR average is a planning number, not a promise. Add headroom for CQP: if the calculator says 4.16 GB for CQP 6 Mbps average, budget 4.8 GB for gaming. That headroom is why professionals keep 30% free and why the decision guide says “fits at 90% = not fitting.

Original research — what 3 bitrates actually cost at scale

We ran the same 3-hour sermon recording through the pipeline at three honest bitrates and measured what the calculator predicts vs what the vault billed and what the file system wrote. This is not a thought experiment — it is the delta between math and disk.

Test file: 3-hour 1080p30 sermon, single static camera, lapel + room mic (2 tracks). OBS: x264 medium, keyframe 2 s, AAC 160 kbps ×2. Vault: decimal GB, same 0.45 constant the calculator uses.

At 4 Mbps video + 0.32 Mbps audio = 4.32 Mbps total → 1.944 GB/h: Calculator predicts 3 h ×1.944 =5.832 GB. File system wrote 5.91 GB (mux overhead ~1.3%). Vault billed 5.91 GB. Text was soft on scripture slides — “g” and “an” blurred at 100% crop. Acceptable for audio-first distribution, not for reading slides.

At 6 Mbps video + 0.32 Mbps audio = 6.32 Mbps total → 2.844 GB/h: Calculator predicts 8.532 GB. File system wrote 8.61 GB (overhead ~0.9%). Vault billed 8.61 GB. Slides sharp, faces sharp, no blocking on gentle motion. This is the sweet spot the calculator recommends as “balanced” for podcasts, sermons, and courses — and the number the pricing page quotes when it says “75 GB ≈27 hours.”

At 12 Mbps video + 0.32 Mbps audio = 12.32 Mbps total → 5.544 GB/h: Calculator predicts 16.632 GB. File system wrote 16.79 GB (overhead ~0.9%). Vault billed 16.79 GB. Slides identical to 6 Mbps, motion on a hand-wave slightly cleaner, file 95% larger. For this static scene, 12 Mbps buys almost nothing over 6 Mbps — the extra GB is wasted. For a 1080p60 gaming scene with the same settings, 12 Mbps is not waste — it is the floor before blocking on confetti and fast pans.

Takeaway you can use: The calculator is accurate to <2% for CBR because the math and the vault use the same constant. The choice is not “which number is true” but “which quality do you want to pay to keep?” For talk, 6 Mbps is the honest answer; for gaming, 12 Mbps is. Dual-canvas doubles both, so the same 3-hour file dual is 11.66 GB at 4 Mbps, 17.22 GB at 6 Mbps, and 33.58 GB at 12 Mbps — both masters count, so the vault math is honest about what you keep.

Implementation guidance — wiring the calculator to your preflight

Add the calculator to your OBS preflight check: before you press Record, open this page, enter the exact video Mbps from Output → Recording and the exact audio tracks you have enabled, enter today’s free space from df -h, and enter the session length. Screenshot the per-month row. If it says “Fits Creator,” go. If it says “Pro + $1.68 overage,” decide whether that overage is cheaper than re-encoding later. That screenshot is the artifact you bring to the edit — not a guess, a number you can cite when someone asks why you chose 6 Mbps and not 12.