Gigabytes per hour
Also known as: GB per hour, recording rate
How much storage an hour of recording consumes, the figure that actually matters when planning cards, drives and uploads.
Updated
What it means
It is bitrate expressed in a useful unit. A rate in megabits per second is correct and abstract; the same number as gigabytes per hour tells somebody how many cards to put in a bag.
The spread is wide. Action camera 4K sits in one range, a ProRes intermediate in another several times larger, and a phone clip sitting somewhere well below either of them.
It compounds with cameras. Three bodies on one session triple the figure without tripling anything that ends up useful, which is the arithmetic behind most of the storage surprises people get.
How it works in practice
Working it out once is enough. A single session measured honestly gives a number that applies to every session afterwards, because habits change far less than conditions do.
Card choice follows from it. Knowing the rate turns a card decision into arithmetic, and an SD card speed class rating covers the write speed rather than the capacity question.
It sets the upload expectation too. The same figure that decides how many cards are needed decides how long an upload takes, which is where a connection becomes the real limit instead of the disk.
What to watch out for
High frame rate modes multiply it quietly. A High frame rate (HFR) clip at the same resolution writes several times the data, and a card that lasted all day at thirty frames does not.
Intermediate codecs are in a different league. Converting footage for editing can occupy several times the original, which is why DNxHD and ProRes workflows need real drives rather than a laptop disk.
Nobody plans for the second copy. The figure doubles the moment a backup exists, and a storage plan that ignores that is a plan with exactly one copy of everything in it.
How RawClip handles it
The figure decides how long an upload takes rather than anything about the result, since footage is read and then released rather than stored indefinitely. Deleting failures on the card before uploading is the one thing that reduces it before the transfer starts.