Data Calculator
Data Calculator
How much card do you need, and how long does one card last? Camera, sensor mode, codec and frame rate in; record time, card count and total storage out.
Table of Contents
- What it answers
- Opening it
- Camera or Custom
- Sensor rate and project rate are different questions
- Cards are smaller than the number on the label
- Audio
- What it gives you
- How this is calculated
- When it refuses to answer
- 360 rigs record several streams at once
- Saving, sharing and exporting
- Related Documentation
What it answers
Three questions, on the day you are ordering media rather than the day you run out:
- How long does one card last in this format?
- How many cards do I need for a given number of set hours, with spares?
- How much total storage will the shoot produce — and across how many copies?
Everything runs offline in your browser.
Opening it
Additional Tools → Data Calculator in the sidebar.
Camera or Custom
Configuration source picks between two ways of describing the format:
- Camera — pick a body, a sensor mode and a codec from the device library. The rate is the manufacturer's published figure for that exact combination.
- Custom — describe a raster and codec directly. The result carries a note saying so: the rate is the codec-level model applied to the raster, not validated against any camera body.
The difference is labelled on the result rather than buried. A number that came from a manufacturer's table and a number that came from a model are not the same kind of number.
Sensor rate and project rate are different questions
This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong, and the tool separates the two inputs on purpose.
- Frame rate (sensor) is what the camera records. The data rate always bills at this rate.
- Project rate (playback) only converts screen time into record time.
Shooting 96 fps for a 24 fps timeline burns four times the media. Quote the project rate and you under-report the card requirement by exactly that factor. When the two differ, the result says so explicitly — "N of screen time at 96→24 fps records in M" — and every card count and total uses the record time.
Cards are smaller than the number on the label
A "1 TB" Codex Compact Drive holds 960 GB. Using the marketed number makes every ARRI record time about 4% optimistic — which is the direction that strands a DIT.
The calculator keeps a table of how much of a card's marketed capacity a body can actually fill, per interface, and it says how much it trusts each figure:
| Confidence | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Verified | The manufacturer publishes the usable figure directly (ARRI's Codex drives). |
| Derived | Reconciled from the manufacturer's own published record times. |
| unlabelled | A flat 0.97 assumption — a guess, and treated as one. |
Two examples of the derived kind: Sony's FX6 sheet reconciles to 0.81–0.85 on CFexpress Type A, not the 0.97 previously assumed — at 0.97 the tool claimed about five minutes of card that was not there. Sony's BURANO chart gives about 0.94 on Type B.
Both derived figures come from one manufacturer reading its own cards, and both err toward under-promising, which is the safe direction for a tool people rent against.
If you know your own card's formatted capacity, type it. The usable-% input overrides the whole table.
Audio
Audio is added as a flat bitrate, not a percentage — four channels of 24-bit 48 kHz is 4.608 Mbit/s no matter what the picture is doing. Against ARRIRAW that is a rounding error (~0.1%); against ProRes 422 Proxy at HD it is around a tenth of the stream. A percentage would be wrong in both directions at once.
What it gives you
- Record time per card and the data rate, with GB per hour.
- Cards needed for the set hours you enter, including spares — and, if you enter how many cards you already have, what those cover.
- Total storage, per day and across however many copies you keep, with the single-copy figure shown separately so a backup policy is visible rather than assumed.
Some codecs are content-dependent, so the rate is a range rather than one figure. The tool says so and tells you to plan against the shorter record time.
How this is calculated
Every result can show its own derivation rather than only the number:
bits per pixel × pixels per frame × sensor frame rate, plus audio
Where a manufacturer publishes a fixed bitrate for a recording format, that is used instead and labelled as published — it does not vary with the sensor mode, and the breakdown says so. The sensor mode readout is listed too, with the note that it sets the field of view, not the rate.
When it refuses to answer
If no published data rate exists for a camera-and-codec combination, the tool says exactly that instead of estimating one. That figure decides how many cards get ordered, so a guess presented as a result would be worse than no result.
It will also tell you plainly when a sensor mode has no recorded resolution, or when you have not yet chosen enough to compute anything.
360 rigs record several streams at once
A frame's pixel count describes one stream. A 360 rig records several simultaneously, and how they land on cards differs by body: an Insta360 Titan writes eight streams to eight cards, while the ONE RS 1-Inch 360 writes two streams to a single card — so that one card fills at twice the rate. The result carries a note naming the stream and card counts whenever this applies.
Saving, sharing and exporting
- Favourites — save a configuration under a name and re-apply it later.
- Copy link — the current configuration in a URL, so a link reproduces exactly what you are looking at.
- Export PDF — the configuration and its results on a page you can send to a producer or a rental desk.
Related Documentation
Last Updated: 2026-09-07 Version: 0.790.2