Here's a rough guide to those megabits per second.
Typical amounts of data that you might create, record, store, move around and transmit.
All numbers are Mb/s. All numbers are near enough for sport, as they say. Many codecs have alternative compression modes, storage devices are available in faster and slower/ cheaper versions. It's just to give you an idea.....
Terminology
Mb mega bit = 1 million bits
MB mega byte = 8 million bits
It would be really helpful if people stuck to bits when describing data rates, and Bytes when describing storage capacity, but they don’t, so be careful.
We also use ‘G’ for giga bit when describing data rates.
3G is approximately 3 gigabits per second etc.
Camera Codec
Old School:
Digital Betacam 90
DVCam & HDV 25
HDCAM 135
XDCAM 35-50
XAVC:
XAVC-L HD 25P 50
XAVC-L 4K 25P 100
XAVC-I HD 25P 100
XAVC-I 4K 25P 250/400
XAVC-I 4K 50P 500
XAVC-I HD 180P 600
RAW 4K 25P
RED Epic-W 8:1 320
Sony XOCN LT 406
Sony XOCN 688
Sony RAW 1000
Varicam LT V-RAW 2200
Alexa Mini RAW 3.4K 2300
Other useful references:
GoPro HD 25P 30
GoPro 4K 25P 60
Amira ProRes HD 4444 312
What you start with:
An HD studio or OB production at 25i 1500
UHD studio or OB production 12000
RAW 25P output from a typical 4K camera 4000
And what you end up with:
Transmission to your screen via IP, Satellite or Freeview:
HD 4 to 8
UHD 10 to 25
Interfaces
Just because you have a fast connection doesn’t mean your source can deliver or your destination can write at that speed:
USB 2.0 480
USB 3.0 (6G) 5000
SATA 3.0 (6G) 6000
USB 3.1 (10G) 10000
Thunderbolt 2 (10G) 10000
Thunderbolt 3 (40G) 40000
SDSDI 270
HDSDI 25P or 25i (1.5G) 1500
HDSDI 50P (3G) 3000
UHD 25P or 25i (6G) 6000
UHD 50P (12G) 12000
Media Write Speeds
Figures are typical maximum for a good quality device. You need plenty of headroom though, for when your media gets a bit tired.
HDD 100
SSD 400
SDXC U3 2000
C-FAST 2 3000
XQD 3200
SxS 3200
AXS 4800
Record Time
What you really need to know of course, is how long can I record for a given capacity card or drive.
Divide your Mbps by two.
That’s the number of GB you will need for an hour.
e.g. recording at 100 Mbps
Divide by two; that’s 50GB an hour.
Your 64GB card will last about an hour and a quarter. It's easy when you know your Mbps !
Mbps/2 = GB/ hr
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