Short answer: a typical Indian wedding shot on three cameras over three days produces about 1.7 TB of 4K footage, and a large five-day wedding with four cameras and a drone can pass 7 TB. A studio shooting fifteen weddings a season needs about 25 TB per season, or 40 to 50 TB a year, before counting edits and deliverables.
Why do weddings produce so much footage?
An Indian wedding is not one event. Haldi, mehndi, sangeet, the wedding and the reception run over three to five days, often in two cities. Each function has two to four cameras rolling for most of it, because you cannot ask the couple to do the pheras again. Add a drone for the baraat and audio recorders on the mandap.
The maths is the same as for any footage: Mbps ÷ 8 = MB per second, × 60 = MB per minute, × 60 = MB per hour. A camera in 4K H.264 at 100 Mbps writes 45 GB an hour; at 200 Mbps, 90 GB. Three cameras for four hours at 100 Mbps is 540 GB for one function.
Storage per wedding: three sizes
| Wedding | Cameras and days | Recording hours | Format | Per hour | Cameras total | Drone and audio | Per wedding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 2 cameras, 2 days, 4 hours a day each | 16 | 4K H.265, about 70 Mbps | about 30 GB | about 480 GB | about 20 GB | about 500 GB |
| Typical | 3 cameras, 3 days, 4 hours a day each | 36 | 4K H.264, about 100 Mbps | 45 GB | about 1.6 TB | about 100 GB | about 1.7 TB |
| Large | 4 cameras, 5 days, 4 hours a day each | 80 | 4K H.264, about 200 Mbps | 90 GB | about 7.2 TB | about 150 GB | about 7.5 TB |
Drone footage is counted at about 30 GB per day. Studios that shoot ProRes or RAW for the main function should double or triple the typical figure; the per-codec table has the hourly rates.
Then add the edit. Proxies, previews, cache, music and three or four deliverables (teaser, highlight, full film, reels) are another 20 to 30 percent, so a typical wedding is about 2 TB by the time it is delivered.
How much per season and per year?
The Indian wedding calendar has two peaks, roughly November to February and April to June, and a working studio shoots ten to twenty weddings in each.
- Fifteen typical weddings at 1.7 TB each is about 25 TB of raw footage per season.
- Two seasons a year is 40 to 50 TB of new footage.
- Add a couple of large weddings and the year is closer to 60 TB.
None of it fits on a Mac. A 2 TB external SSD costs ₹12,000 to ₹18,000 and holds one typical wedding. A 4 to 5 TB portable hard drive costs ₹9,000 to ₹12,000 and holds two or three, at speeds too slow to edit 4K from comfortably. A studio storing a year on drives buys ten to fifteen, then buys them again for a second copy.
What do you owe the couple?
Your contract sets the deliverables, and it should also cover the footage. Three things to write down:
- Which films are delivered and in what format. A 4K highlight film at 50 Mbps is about 4.5 GB for 12 minutes; a two-hour full film at the same bitrate is about 45 GB.
- Whether the couple gets raw footage. If yes, it is 1 to 2 TB to hand over, on a drive they supply or a link they download over days.
- How long you keep the raw footage after delivery. Six to twelve months is common. Some studios offer longer retention as a paid add-on.
Wedding footage is personal data under India’s DPDP Act, 2023: faces, voices, family, guests. Couples increasingly ask where it is stored, who can open it and when it is deleted, and a written answer is easier than making one up on a call.
How long should you keep it?
Keep everything until every deliverable is approved. After that, keep the project files and final films for good; they are a few tens of gigabytes per wedding. Keep the raw for the retention period in your contract, then delete it on schedule. A shelf of unlabelled drives is not a retention policy, and it is how “can you send the sangeet again” becomes a two-day search. The planning maths for a season is in how many hours of video fit in 1 TB.
Where Driveless fits
Driveless is a streaming cloud drive for Mac, launching in India in January 2027. A studio’s whole season appears in Finder as one drive on every editor’s Mac, taking 0 KB locally, and the studio cache lets the office share one download of each wedding. Team is ₹1,799 per editor a month with 1 TB per editor pooled and extra pooled terabytes at ₹799, so three editors with 10 TB live is about ₹10,990 a month plus GST. Review links with time-coded notes handle the couple’s feedback, and the first 50 founding studios get three months free. The waitlist is open and the plans are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
How much footage does one Indian wedding produce?
About 500 GB for a two-camera, two-day wedding in 4K H.265, about 1.7 TB for three cameras over three days in 4K H.264, and 7 TB or more for four cameras over five days at high bitrates with a drone. Add 20 to 30 percent for the edit.
How much storage does a wedding videographer need per season?
Fifteen typical weddings at about 1.7 TB each is around 25 TB per season before edits and deliverables, so 40 to 50 TB a year for a studio working both seasons.
How long should a wedding videographer keep raw footage?
At least until the final films are delivered and approved, and most studios keep raw for 6 to 12 months after that. Put the retention period in the contract so the couple knows when it ends.