Video File Size Calculator (by format)

This video file size calculator helps you estimate how much space a video takes up on your disk. All you need to do is select the video and compression format, determine the video length, and choose the frame rate of your file.

If you're unfamiliar with video formats, check out our video frame size calculator, which finds the video size of an uncompressed file based on the resolution and color depth.

Every video comprises a series of still images, presented one after another to create a moving picture. These still images are called video frames. Each frame is shown on the screen for a very short time (for example, 1/24 of a second), which makes the images appear to blend together.

If you want to calculate the video file size, you need to sum up the data size of each of these digital still images. It means that we can find the total file size using:

• file size = N × frame size

where N is the number of frames in a video.

To calculate the value of N, you need two pieces of information: the duration of the video and its frame rate. The frame rate is the number of frames per second (fps) of the video. It usually ranges from 12 fps for animation through 24 fps for regular movies to even 60 fps. N is obtained by multiplying these two values, so finally, you can arrive at the following formula for video file size:

file size = duration × frame rate × frame size

The file size is expressed in data size units, such as bytes, kilobytes, or megabytes. Visit our byte conversion calculator to learn more.

If you're not an expert on data size, you are probably perplexed by the conversion between different units. You've undoubtedly heard two contradictory stories. In the first version, one kilobyte is the equivalent of 1000 bytes, and in the second — of 1024 bytes. Which one is true?

Before answering this question, let's clarify what a unit prefix is. It is the word that stands just before the unit name – for example, kilo- or mega-. Each prefix has a fixed numerical value: for instance, kilo- refers to a thousand (so one kilogram is equal to a thousand grams), and mega- refers to a million (so one megapixel consists of a million pixels.

The whole confusion stems from mixing up two types of unit prefixes: metric and binary. Metric prefixes always have a numerical value of 10ⁿ (so 10, 100, 1000, and so on). You undoubtedly know them: milli-, centi-, kilo-, mega-, and giga- are all metric prefixes.

On the other hand, binary unit prefixes have a numerical value expressed as a power of two. These are not popular, which means you might not have heard about prefixes such as kibi- or mebi-. One kibibyte (KiB for short) is the equivalent of 1024 bytes, and one mebibyte (MiB) is the same as 1024² bytes.

So, what does it mean for our video file size calculator? When using regular metric prefixes and talking about megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB), you should be using the 1000 multiplier. When, on the other hand, you'd like to use kibibytes (KiB) or mebibytes (MiB), you should apply the 1024 multipliers.

Did you know that a low signal-to-noise ratio can disrupt the data transfer of audio and video files?

Another question you might be asking now is about the accuracy of this video file size calculator. Unfortunately, it is not 100% accurate — the actual video size will differ a bit from our computation. Still, you can use this video space calculator to give you an approximate prediction of how much space your new video will occupy on the hard drive.

If you need some more video editing tools, head straight to our frames to timecode calculator or our streaming bitrate calculator if you want to live stream your own content!