Not just encoding, but it also depends on a number of things like color depth, chroma subsampling (4:2:2), and so on. It's not uncommon for a single film to approach half a petabyte of raw in a digital world with a "typical" setup (4:2:2, ProRes maybe, 10-bit, etc). To use an example, I think I read somewhere that Gone Girl shot a few hundred TB for a technically straightforward film. Some cameras, particularly when you start getting to digital cinema (which is > "4K"), can shoot as much as a terabyte and a half per hour. There are 8K sensors in common availability now; RED has one that can shoot 75fps 8K at 2.4:1, which I don't even want to calculate, but that I know for a fact it can't write to its own storage at native bitrate. Productions eat storage these days and moving that data around is a challenge.

Hint, hint, to clever founders: hard drives in Hollywood.

22 GB for an hour of 4k video is fairly compressed. Raw 4k footage runs closer to 300 GB hour.

Don't forget parity drives for availability take away from usable storage.

NAS #1 is 12 x 4TB with 2 drives used for parity.

NAS #2 is 20 x 6TB with 4 drives used for parity.

That takes away roughly 32TB of usable space under zfs. NAS #1 has 40TB usable. NAS #2 has 96TB usable. Total 136TB usable.

The remainder of the drives not accounted in the list above are in workstations for local storage and other random tasks.

> From a little googling, 4k video appears to take about 22GB an hour

That's "home delivery" video, not the stuff you work on which would be far less compressed or even uncompressed, and would include reams of data thrown out entirely at the final production stages.

Think about the difference between "work" (mixing/mastering/production) audio data (uncompressed and at 24 or 32 bits) versus "consumer" audio (mp3/aac at 48/16).

Editing also tends to create a lot of huge temporary and intermediate files that will eat up disk space in a hurry. 188TB is a lot of space, but nowhere near unreasonable for someone doing video work. Plus, as other people have mentioned you need to account for filesystem overhead, redundancy (RAID), backups, TB vs. TiB, and so on.

My 1440p 4:4:4 videogame captures at 60 fps come out to about 700 GB per hour, sometimes more depending on the scene complexity. That would fill up a 200 TB array in no time.

I'd record to ProRes or DNxHR if I could, but there's no viable method for doing that on Windows without using an FFMPEG pipeline (which won't do 4:4:4 color sampling with those codecs and simply uses too much CPU at 4:2:2).

Why do you do that?

I would haircut the number for RAID then probably half it if he uses a backup.