The answer isn’t completely straightforward. Many factors influence the answer, such as how much total storage your device has, how much other data is on your phone, and what resolution video you’re shooting. To figure out the answer, let’s take a look at how each of these issues impacts how much video you can record on your iPhone.
How Much Available Storage You Have
The most important factor in how much video you can record on your iPhone is how much space you have available to record that video into. If you have 100 MB of storage free, that’s your limit for recording video. Every user has a different amount of storage space available (and, in case you’re wondering, you can’t expand an iPhone’s memory). It’s impossible to say precisely how much storage space any user has available without seeing their device. Because of that, there’s no single answer to how much video any user can record; it’s different for everyone. But let’s make some reasonable assumptions and work from them. Let’s assume that the average user is using 20 GB of storage on their iPhone (this is probably low, but it’s a good, round number that makes the math easy). This includes iOS, their apps, music, photos, etc. On a 32 GB iPhone, this leaves them 12 GB of available storage to record video into; on a 256 GB iPhone, it leaves 236 GB.
Finding Your iPhone’s Available Storage Capacity
To find out how much free space you have on your iPhone, follow these steps:
How Much Space Each Kind of Video Takes Up
To know how much video you can record, you need to know how much space a video is going to take up. The iPhone’s camera can record video at different resolutions. Lower resolutions lead to smaller files (which means you can store more video shot in lower resolution). All modern iPhones can record video at 720p and 1080p HD, while the iPhone 6 series and up adds 1080p HD at 60 frames/second, and the iPhone 6S series and newer adds 4K HD. Slow-motion at 120 frames/second and 240 frames/second is available on these models.
Make Your iPhone Video Take Less Space With HEVC
The resolution you use isn’t the only thing that determines how much space the video you record needs. The video encoding format makes a big difference, too. In iOS 11, Apple added support for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, or h.265) format, which can make the same video up to 50% smaller than the standard h.264 format. By default, devices running iOS 11 use HEVC, but you can choose the format you prefer by following these steps: According to Apple, this is how much storage space video at each of these resolutions and formats takes up (figures are rounded and approximate):
