Codec Bitrate Chart: Every Common Video Codec and What It Costs

Every codec decision is also a storage and card speed decision, and the arithmetic is simple enough to do in your head once you know the two conversions. The tables below give bitrate, storage per hour and required sustained write for every format you are likely to shoot, along with how long a Delkin 512GB CFexpress Type B 4.0 holds each one.

The two conversions worth memorising

Bitrate in megabits per second divided by 8 gives megabytes per second, which is the sustained write speed a card must hold. A 240 Mbps codec needs 30 MB/s sustained, which almost any modern card manages, and a 1,200 Mbps codec needs 150 MB/s, which no SD card sustains.

Bitrate in megabits per second multiplied by 450 gives gigabytes per hour, closely enough for planning. A 240 Mbps codec is about 108 GB per hour. That figure comes from dividing by 8 for bytes, then multiplying by 3,600 seconds and dividing by 1,000 twice for gigabytes.

Those two conversions answer nearly every practical media question. What card do I need, and how many hours does it hold. Everything else in this chart is those two calculations applied to specific formats.

The full codec table

The pattern to take from this is where the jumps are. Long-GOP to all-intra roughly doubles storage. All-intra to ProRes doubles it again. ProRes to RAW doubles it once more. Each of those steps buys something real, and each of them costs you drives, offload time and archive space forever rather than once.

What card class each bitrate requires

A V90 SD card guarantees 90 MB/s minimum sustained write, and that covers everything up to about 700 Mbps. That is a large fraction of what most people actually shoot, which is why starting on fast SD in a dual-format camera and adding CFexpress later is a genuinely sensible way to spread the cost.

Media at these speeds

$194 to $280. Type B for most cameras, Type A for Sony cine bodies, and an SSD for recorders and offload.

Best value $279.99

Delkin Devices

Delkin 512GB CFexpress Type B 4.0

512 GB of CFexpress 4.0 at the lowest sane price per gigabyte, which matters because RAW eats cards faster than any other format decision.

Capacity

512 GB

Spec

CFexpress 4.0 Type B

The value card for most cine bodies.

Check price

Type A value $194.22

Lexar

Lexar 256GB CFexpress Type A Silver 4.0

More capacity per dollar than the first-party Type A cards, which makes the format tolerable rather than punitive.

Capacity

256 GB

Check your camera's approved list first.

Check price

Best value $237

Samsung

Samsung T9 1TB Portable SSD

The same 2000 MB/s class in a smaller shell that holds speed better under a long sustained copy.

Capacity

1 TB

The value pick for daily offloads.

Check price

Why bitrate is not image quality

Two codecs at the same bitrate can look very different, because compression efficiency varies enormously. H.265 achieves roughly the same quality as H.264 at about half the bitrate, and both are long-GOP formats that describe most frames as differences from neighbours. That efficiency is why a 150 Mbps H.265 file can match a 300 Mbps H.264 one.

All-intra codecs use more bits for the same visual quality by design, because every frame is stored complete rather than as a difference. The bits are not buying a better picture, they are buying a file that scrubs instantly and does not degrade on complex or noisy footage.

RAW formats break the comparison entirely, because they store sensor data rather than an image. Comparing a RAW bitrate with a ProRes bitrate is comparing two different kinds of file, and the RAW one gives you editable white balance that no amount of ProRes bitrate provides.

Where bitrate actually matters

• Complex scenes. Rain, foliage, confetti, water and heavy grain all defeat a low-bitrate long-GOP codec, which runs out of bits to describe how much changed between frames.
• Green screen. Compression artefacts around a subject edge make a key hard to pull cleanly, and bitrate plus chroma subsampling both matter here.
• Heavy grading. Pushing colour hard exposes compression blocking that was invisible on the original.
• Fast motion at high frame rates. More frames per second means the same bitrate is spread thinner across each one.
• Long takes. A codec that degrades gracefully at the start can visibly fall apart on a twenty minute continuous shot.
• Nothing else. On a well lit, moderately detailed scene delivered without a heavy grade, a good 100 Mbps file and a 400 Mbps file are hard to tell apart.

That last point is the honest one. Bitrate matters at the margins and in specific circumstances, and most footage never encounters those circumstances. Choosing a codec is often more about editing performance and storage cost than about a visible difference on screen.

Planning a shoot day

Estimate hours of recording rather than hours on location. A documentary day with eight hours on location typically produces two to four hours of recorded material; a multi-camera event with cameras running continuously can produce twenty across three cameras.

Multiply by the per hour figure from the table, then double it, because the backup discipline requires two copies on separate drives before any card is reused. A four hour day at 240 Mbps is 432 GB recorded and 864 GB of drive space consumed.

Then check the card side separately. Four hours at 240 Mbps needs 432 GB of card capacity across however many cards you carry, and two 512 GB cards covers it comfortably with the loss of one card costing part of a day rather than all of it.