One Minute Of Phone Video At Every Setting: iPhone And Android Sizes Compared

Day Three In Hunza

The storage warning appeared on the third morning of a family trip to Hunza, somewhere above Karimabad, with the day's drive still ahead and no laptop within a hundred miles to offload anything. My phone had started the trip with about 34 GB free. Nothing about my shooting had felt extravagant: short clips of the road, the river, the fort, the kids at a roadside stall. What I found, standing in a hotel corridor that evening, was one settings change from day one. I had switched the camera to 4K at 60 frames per second for a sunset over Rakaposhi, and I had never switched it back. Every ordinary clip after that sunset had been recorded at the most expensive setting the phone offers.

The short answer to the question this page exists for: one minute of phone video weighs about 60 MB at 720p and about 400 MB at 4K 60, with every common setting priced in the table below. The sunset clip earned its size. The forty clips after it, shot at the same setting by accident, were the expensive part.

One Minute At Every Setting

Phones record at a bitrate per setting, and the rule from the rest of this site applies unchanged: bitrate times sixty seconds, divided by eight. I priced each setting with the audio field at zero, because the published per-minute estimates already fold a phone's audio track into their totals. The bitrates are the typical rates behind Apple's published settings figures, and Android flagships record at rates in the same band.

The sunset clip was worth it. The forty ordinary clips after it, shot at the same setting by accident, were the expensive part.

Sanity-check the top and bottom of the table against the maker of your phone. Apple publishes approximate sizes right inside the Record Video settings, from about 60 MB a minute at 720p to about 400 MB at 4K 60, and Samsung and Google flagships quote near-identical behaviour because the bitrates behind the settings are near-identical. Every row of the table came out of the video file size calculator before it went near this page. Resolution names travel between brands; bitrates are what the storage feels.

iPhone, Android, And The Codec Switch

One switch cuts most rows of that table roughly in half: the recording format. In the calculator's model, the H.265 or HEVC choice scales the video bitrate by about half, and phone makers behave the same way. A minute of 4K at 30 fps comes out near 350 MB in H.264 and near 175 MB in HEVC; Apple's own settings estimates print 170 MB for that row, close enough to confirm the model. iPhones record in the high efficiency format by default on current models. Many Android phones still default to H.264 for compatibility, with HEVC behind a "high efficiency" or "storage saver" toggle in the camera settings, which is exactly where my phone stood in Hunza.

The trade is the same one I priced for exported files in The H.264, H.265 And AV1 Comparison: half the storage, in exchange for older devices and some editing software handling the files less happily. On a trip, with no offload in reach, I take the half every time. At home, recording a clip I will edit that evening, the compatibility is worth more than the megabytes.

Slow motion deserves a footnote in the same section of the settings, because it breaks the table's pattern. A 1080p slow-motion clip at 120 or 240 frames per second can out-cost plain 4K per minute, since the frame rate multiplies the data before the codec ever sees it. If your phone offers slow motion, treat it like 4K: a deliberate tool for one scene, never a setting to leave running at a wedding or a match.

The Trip Maths: Days Of Storage

The per-day column of the table is the number a traveller actually lives by, and my corridor maths that evening took three lines. At 4K 60 in H.264, thirty minutes of clips a day is about 12,000 MB, about 12 GB. Day one took the free space to about 22 GB. Day two took it to about 10 GB. Somewhere in day three, between the fort and the river, the phone filled and the camera started refusing video. Every figure in that reconstruction is in the table; the only surprise was that I had never done it before the trip.

Turned around, the same table answers the question people ask in phone shops: how much video does this phone hold? A 128 GB phone, completely empty, holds about 2,133 minutes of 720p, roughly thirty-five and a half hours. At 1080p 30 in H.264 it holds about 985 minutes, sixteen hours and change. At 4K 30 it holds about 366 minutes, barely six hours, and at 4K 60 about 320 minutes. No phone on that shelf is empty, and mine carried photos, apps and two years of messages into Hunza, which is why the honest version of this maths starts from free space rather than the number on the box.

Step 1: read your free space. Settings will tell you the gigabytes free. Write the number down; a feeling of "plenty" is not a number.

Step 2: record one honest minute. At your current setting, shoot sixty seconds of ordinary movement and read that file's size. It prices your phone, your settings and your scenery in one measurement.

Step 3: divide. Free space, converted to megabytes, divided by minutes per day at your measured rate, gives the days the trip can last. If the answer is shorter than the trip, change the setting or clear space before you leave, not in a corridor on day three.

The Setting I Travel With Now

My travel default is 1080p at 30 fps with the high efficiency format on: about 65 MB a minute in the calculator's model, under 2 GB for a thirty minute shooting day, and good enough for everything my family watches on phones and a living room television. 4K comes out on purpose now, for a scene I have chosen, and goes off again in the same minute. The use case is bigger than holidays: parents at a school event, a shopkeeper recording product clips all week, anyone whose camera roll is also their archive.

One minute of video is the smallest unit a phone sells you, and it costs anywhere from 60 MB to 400 MB depending on a setting you may have changed once and forgotten. Check the setting before the trip. When the trip ends, uploading the results carries its own maths, priced in The 4K Against 1080p Upload Comparison. The sunset will still be there, and this time the phone will have room for it.