4K Video Storage

[mircea.anton99]

I am going to get a GoPro Hero 6 and I will be recording 4k 60fps. How much storage will i need? I don't want to get a couple TB "just to be sure" since i am going to get SSds and they are quite expensive. I'm thinking 500GB will be enough? I am going to shoot 5-30 minute videos (live music performances and everyday casual shooting, i.e. hikes and dives and what not), and will only store the current 2-3 active projects for editing.

 

[13thmonkey]

why use SSD's for that? My 1080p camera will consume 4GB every 15mins, so you are probably talking about 20GB every 15mins.

 

[mircea.anton99]

why use SSD's for that? My 1080p camera will consume 4GB every 15mins, so you are probably talking about 20GB every 15mins.

The SSD will only hold the projects i am currently working on and i am moving from an older and therefore slow machine so i am really going for speed and performance on this build. I will have one HDD in it, but it will be used to store finished projects and anything that is not important. So to answer your question, i want SSD for performance

 

[grimfox]

The numbers I'm seeing show about 400MB for 1min of 4k60. I added a little fudge factor because several for the sources didn't list the frame rate. These are mostly in reference to the Iphones camera and Apple is running a proprietary compression algorithm so YMMV.

If you are budgeting I'd say that a 500GB SSD would allow you to work about 500Minutes of film. Almost all of that factors back to the compression rate. Not all video compresses equally. You may find that your spelunking video does or does not compress as well as your dive video and thus take more or less space on your drive.

Personally, since you've already got the camera, go do a test shoot. See how big the file is and then you'll have a good idea of what you'll need.

Edit: I kept digging I think I found a better answer. Which blows away the above, If you have longer videos you may want to look at the 1TB SSDs
https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/how-much-storage-is-required-for-1-minutes-of-4k-video-shooting-1-1.8220/

Edit2: another couple links,
use redcode36 4k 60FPS reds are very high end and they can create uncompressed video files, this is a worst case estimate.
https://www.digitalrebellion.com/webapps/videocalc
Straight from gopro, doesn't incluse 4k 60 but you can easily postulate that 60fps would be about double.
https://gopro.com/help/articles/Question_Answer/HERO4-Black-Recording-Time-in-Each-Video-Setting

 

[cryoburner]

Straight from gopro, doesn't incluse 4k 60 but you can easily postulate that 60fps would be about double.
https://gopro.com/help/articles/Question_Answer/HERO4-Black-Recording-Time-in-Each-Video-Setting

With modern video compression formats, doubling frame rate shouldn't double the file size. Just compare 60 vs 30fps at the lower resolutions in that chart, for example. At 1440p, it increases from 45 to 60 Mbps, an increase of just 33%. So, assuming the Hero 6 used the same levels of compression, you might expect it to climb to around 80 Mbps, or around 600MB per minute at 4K (It looks like the specs on another site list it as 78 Mbps). At that rate, you would be looking at around 36GB of storage needed for one hour of 4K60 video.

I agree that if you're storing a lot of video, long-term storage is probably best left to mechanical drives. A 4TB HDD can be had for as little as $100, at about 2.5 cents per GB. For SSDs, your currently looking at spending at least around 25 cents per GB, which is roughly 10 times as much, or more for higher performance models. And if the files are important, you'll probably want to back them up on another drive as well.