In the middle of recording a video during yesterday evening’s dance class, my iPhone popped up an alert, a message notifying me that I ran out of disk space and that the current video recording was halted. After seeing the notification, I had mentally prepared myself to visit the Apple store to trade in my phone, upgrading the iPhone to one with larger disk capacity — perhaps doubling the capacity, from 2TB to 4 TB — but fortunately discovered that I can reclaim about 1/2 a TB of space by performing some clean up, pushing out the need to upgrade my phone.

What’s taking up all that space?

I attend dance classes ritually on Tuesdays and Thursdays and almost every class, I capture footage of the entire class, recording myself in order to both 1) create recap videos and 2) reflect on my dance, what I liked, what I dislike. These dance classes in London tend to run 90 minutes and recording at 30 frames per second (FPS), 1080P, HEVC encoding (I had assumed video was being encoded with H.264 and today learned about HEVC, a more efficient format), that’s about 3.6 GB of disk space per hour of video, taking up about 5.4 GB of space per class.

But why the hell is CapCut program itself eating up almost 1TB of space, almost half of the capacity on my iPhone?

What the hell is going on!?

It appears that CapCut duplicates each imported video file in a project. That’s my guess and it would make sense because the application should not affect the original file. This would explain why a project file consisting of a 30 second video clip extracted from 2 hour clip take up 10GB?

So now, I am currently performing some maintenance on my iPhone, carefully deleting project files. What’s odd is that there seems to be some sort of misreporting of disk space because when I delete what I think is 10 GB of project files, I only see a few hundred (about 400 MB) reclaimed. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reason, like perhaps some background process or thread has not kicked in to update the disk utilization?

Either way, I am going to hold off on upgrading my iPhone that contains a larger capacity and try and reclaim 500GB of space.