Donaldson R F Tape Digitising Storage Calculator
How much disk space do your old tapes need? Enter how many tapes and hours you have, choose a capture quality and see the storage for the capture, a safety margin and backup copies.
Estimate, not advice. Real file sizes depend on your capture device, software and settings. Capture a few minutes first and measure the file before buying storage, and always keep more than one copy of tapes you cannot replace.
How the estimate is worked out
Storage = hours of tape × data per hour. DV (MiniDV, and DV made by an analogue-to-DV converter) is a fixed rate: every frame takes 144,000 bytes in PAL (12 sequences of 150 blocks of 80 bytes) or 120,000 bytes in NTSC (10 sequences), including the picture, sound and control data, at 25 or 29.97 frames a second. That is 3.6 million bytes per second, or about 13 GB per hour, whatever the picture contains. Uncompressed 4:2:2 is width × height × 2 bytes × frames per second, plus the sound. H.264 is your chosen video bitrate ÷ 8 per second plus the audio. Audio is 48 kHz × 2 bytes × 2 channels (192,000 bytes/s) for PCM, or the AAC bitrate you pick. Sizes are shown in GB of 1,000,000,000 bytes (as drive makers count) and in GiB of 1,073,741,824 bytes (as Windows File Explorer shows them).
The working drive figure adds your safety margin for re-captures, edited project files and temporary render files. Backup copies hold only the captured video, so they do not include the margin. VHS, Video8 and Hi8 are analogue, so quality depends on the capture device rather than the tape; MiniDV is digital and can be copied as DV without recompression. Recorded hours means the time actually recorded: if a tape was recorded in a long-play mode, enter the real playing time, not the label. Capture happens in real time, so ten 2-hour tapes take at least 20 hours of playback.
After capturing: convert the file to a friendlier format with the Video Converter, shrink it with Compress Video, remove blank tape and leader with Trim & Cut Video, save just the sound with Extract Audio from Video, and work out how long a copy or upload will take with the Download Time Calculator. Lossless codecs are not offered as a fixed figure because their size varies with the picture; capture a minute, measure the file and use the bitrate option instead.
Source / Last verified (26 September 2026): DV frame structure — 80-byte DIF blocks, 150-block sequences, 12 sequences per frame (625-50) or 10 (525-60), 25 and 29.97 frames/s — from the DV standard IEC 61834-2:1998 as summarised in Wikipedia, DV (video format) (the standard itself is paywalled and was not read) with the 80-byte DIF block size and the frame rates confirmed in the IETF's RFC 6469. Uncompressed and bitrate figures are arithmetic; the frame sizes 720 × 576 (PAL) and 720 × 480 (NTSC) are typical capture sizes you can change, not values from a standard.