Measurement · 2 min read
How much storage does a Mac screen recording take?
In this measurement, it depended almost entirely on how much was moving: a recording with nothing moving took 0.6 MB per minute, one with an animation 16.9 MB, and one with text scrolling the whole time 194.9 MB. Measured on October 19, 2026 on three recordings of a window on the Retina display of a MacBook Pro, all at 4096 × 2570 pixels in H.264.
Why do the recordings differ so much in size?
Because they contain different numbers of frames: the still recording from October 19, 2026 on the MacBook Pro averaged 0.7 frames per second, the scrolling one 52.5. With the same length and the same picture size, the three files differ in size by a factor of more than 300.
The more frames per second, the higher the bitrate was in these three recordings.
| Content | Frames per second | Bitrate | Per minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing moving | 0.7 | 0.1 Mbit/s | 0.6 MB |
| Animation | 35.6 | 2.2 Mbit/s | 16.9 MB |
| Scrolling text | 52.5 | 26.0 Mbit/s | 194.9 MB |
Each value comes from one 30-second recording, scaled to one minute.
Which format does a Mac save screen recordings in?
As MOV files: Apple names .mov as the format for screen recordings (Mac User Guide, checked October 19, 2026). All three recordings from October 19, 2026 on the MacBook Pro were H.264 videos at 4096 × 2570 pixels; the window itself was 4112 × 2580 pixels.
How do you make a screen recording smaller?
By exporting it at a lower resolution: the scrolling recording from October 19, 2026 on the MacBook Pro got 63.0% smaller at 1080p in HEVC, from 97.47 MB to 36.08 MB. How much each preset saves for each type of content is covered in How do you shrink a video on a Mac without an extra app?.
How was this measured?
The measurement covers three 30-second screen recordings made on October 19, 2026 on the built-in Liquid Retina XDR display of a MacBook Pro with M5 Pro running macOS 27.0.1.
- Recording: a Chrome window of 2056 × 1290 points with
screencapture -x -o -l <window> -v -V 30, without sound. - Content: a page of license text with nothing moving; the same page scrolling at a steady pace; a web page with an animation running in part of the picture.
- Analysis: file size in bytes plus duration, resolution, codec, frame rate and bitrate from AVFoundation; 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes, 1 Mbit/s is 1,000,000 bits per second.
Recordings of the full display, recordings with sound and other devices were not measured; results there will differ. The recordings themselves are not published.