File size
Also known as: clip size, storage per file
How much space a recording occupies, decided almost entirely by bitrate and duration rather than by resolution on its own.
Updated
What it means
Size is bitrate multiplied by time. Resolution influences it only because higher resolutions are normally recorded at a higher Bitrate, and the two get confused with each other constantly.
That is why a short 4K clip can be smaller than a long 1080p one from the same camera. The label on a file says nothing useful about how much room it will actually need on a disk.
Codec efficiency changes it dramatically. H.265 (HEVC) produces roughly half the size of H.264 at the same visual quality, which is the entire reason the codec exists at all.
How it works in practice
The useful figure is per hour rather than per file. Gigabytes per hour is what tells somebody whether a card or a drive will survive a session, and a single file size tells nobody anything.
Chaptering hides it. Action cameras split long recordings into Chaptered video files, so a session is many files of a similar size rather than one large one. The total is what matters and nothing displays it.
Lowering it is paid for in detail. A lower bitrate at the same resolution is smaller and softer, and compression artefacts arrive before anybody notices the size saving.
What to watch out for
Upload time is the real constraint. A file that fits on a disk easily can still be an overnight job on a domestic connection, which is a separate problem that storage planning ignores entirely.
Platform limits are stricter than they look. Messaging applications and email reject large files outright, and a result that needs a link rather than an attachment surprises people more than it should.
Converting to save space usually fails. Transcoding a finished file smaller throws away quality the original had, and sending a smaller version of a compressed file compounds the damage rather than reducing it.
How RawClip handles it
Delivered files are encoded to be reasonable to download and keep rather than as large as possible, since the point is a video somebody can share. Raw footage is uploaded at full size, because the analysis needs exactly what the camera recorded.