How Much Video Can You Record on an iPhone?

Thanks to its world-class camera and great apps for editing video, the iPhone is a mobile-video powerhouse (some feature films by major directors have even been shot on them). But what good is that if you don't have enough memory to store the video? The question that iPhone owners who record a lot of videos must ask is: How much video can you record on the iPhone?

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:

1. Go to Settings.

2. Tap General.

3. Tap About.

4. Look for the Available line. This shows how much unused space you have to store the video you record.

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:

1. Tap Settings.

2. Tap Camera.

3. Tap Formats.

4. Tap High Efficiency (HEVC) or Most Compatible (h.264).

According to Apple, this is how much storage space video at each of these resolutions and formats takes up (figures are rounded and approximate):

How Much Video an iPhone Can Store

Here's where we get down figuring out how much video iPhones can store. Assuming that each device has 20 GB of other data on it, here's how much each storage capacity option of the iPhone can store for each kind of video. The figures here have been rounded and are approximate.