14
Showing your Quality
How much can I record to a microSD card?
Depends on a couple of things, really. The resolution, frame rate and
quality settings will all have profound effects on your data consumption.
Check out the table for a quick rundown:
Setting Resolution
Approx. Bitrate
(Mbps)
High / Medium / Low
Approx. Minutes of
Recording per GB
High / Medium / Low
720p
1280 x 720
8.5 / 6.6 / 4.5 Mbps
14min / 20min / 30min
720pH
1280 x 720
12.8 / 9.7 / 6.6 Mbps
9min / 13min / 20min
1080pS
1440 x 1080
13.0 / 11.0 / 9.0 Mbps
9min / 11min / 13min
1080p
1920 x 1080
15.6 / 12.4 / 10.1 Mbps
8min / 10min / 12min
As you can see, there’s a lot of variation here. 720p on low quality can
record almost four times as much video as 1080p on high quality.
So, say you’ve got a 32GB microSD card in the Atom HD (or two 16GB
cards) - how much can you actually record?
Even though a card claims to be “32GB”, you’ll actually only get
about 28 - 30GB of useable space.
The overhead is lost to the file
allocation table (the FAT - it’s a bit like an index) which tells the camera
where to record data. So: we’re going to have to be a little vague,
because
some microSD cards can actually hold more or less than
others that claim to be the same size!
•
At 1080p on high quality, a 32GB card can record somewhere
between three and a half and four hours. This is way longer than
the battery will last, so you should be fine if you copy images off
regularly!
•
At 720p on low quality, that same 32GB card will last for a massive
14 hours, or more. Great for times when you’ve access to a charger
but nothing to copy images to.
