About Axen Works

Who is actually writing this

My name is Ulisses Balbino. I direct commercial film, and I have been doing it for fourteen years out of Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2012 I co-founded a production company here, Pichorra Filmes, with Lisandra Barros. In that time I have directed work for brands including Starbucks, Disney and Yamaha, along with a long list of jobs nobody outside the industry has heard of, which is where most of the real learning happens.

These days my title is AI Creative Director, which sounds like a job invented last Tuesday and mostly means this: I build automation for creative production. Pipelines, small tools, pieces of software that take the repetitive part of a shoot or an edit off a human being. Axen Works is one of those pieces, made public.

None of that should have to be taken on faith, so here is where to check it. My portfolio, with the work and the credits on it, is at ulissesbalbino.com. The professional record is on LinkedIn. And I write about AI in production at openyourais.com, which is also where my email lives. That is why the contact address on this site reads ulisses@openyourais.com and not something on this site's own domain: it is one person with one inbox, and I would rather give you the address I actually read every day than invent a second one to make a one man site look like a department.

There is no team here and no company behind the site. It is one director, one code editor, and a stubborn habit of checking numbers. I build with AI coding tools, because that is my day job now and it would be strange to pretend otherwise, and every published figure that reaches these pages is read out of the manufacturer document and checked by hand before it becomes code. The machine is fast. The machine is also happy to invent a plausible number, which is exactly the thing this site exists to refuse.

The problem that made me build it

Media arithmetic never goes away in this job. Before a shoot, somebody has to say how many cards to rent. During a shoot, somebody has to say whether the last setup fits on what is left. At the end of a day, somebody has to say whether the drive going home holds everything. At delivery, somebody has to say what bitrate still fits inside the file size a client or a platform will accept.

For years I did that arithmetic on the back of a call sheet, and sometimes at midnight on a phone with a rental house waiting for an answer. The last time I went looking for help with it, the question was simple: how much ProRes fits on a one terabyte drive.

What I found was a page of calculators that answered instantly, in a confident font, and not one of them said where its number came from. Several offered a single figure for 4K without asking which camera, which codec or which frame rate, which is not an answer. That is a guess with good typography. Ask a different site the same question and you get a different number, and no way to tell which one to trust, because neither of them will name a source.

That is a small annoyance when you are curious. It is an expensive problem when you are ordering media for a shoot that starts on Tuesday.

So I built the thing I wanted. A calculator that names its source next to the answer, that asks which codec you are actually shooting, and that says nothing when it has nothing sourced to say.

What is here

Underneath, all of it is one piece of arithmetic. A video file is a stream of bits, so file size is the data rate multiplied by the duration, divided by eight. Rearrange the same equation and it gives you recording time from a capacity, or the bitrate that fits a fixed slot. One engine, three directions, and then a few specialised tools on top of it.

• Storage and recording time, which is the main one, for the question of how many hours fit on a card or a drive.
• Bitrate and file size, for the delivery end, with the audio track added in, which most calculators quietly forget.
• ProRes file size, carrying the complete published Apple table rather than a handful of rounded numbers.
• Blackmagic RAW file size, derived from the published compression ratio with the derivation shown on the page.
• GoPro recording time, built on GoPro's own published capacity chart.
• Shutter angle and timecode, for the two pieces of set arithmetic that cost the most when they go wrong.

Everything runs in your browser. No account, no upload, no paywall, no waiting.

The rules this site holds itself to

• No invented numbers. Every data rate here is published by a manufacturer or a platform, or derived from a published figure in a way that is explained on the page where it is used. Where nobody publishes a number, this site says so rather than filling the hole. Instagram, for example, publishes codec and resolution requirements for reels but no target bitrate, so there is no Instagram bitrate on this site.
• Sources sit next to the answer, not hidden in a footer. The full trail, document by document, is on the sources page.
• Estimates are called estimates. Variable bitrate, scene complexity and file system overhead all move a real file. Any page that promises you an exact size for a compressed video file is lying, politely.
• The arithmetic is tested. The engine has to reproduce Apple's own gigabytes per hour column across all 348 cells of the ProRes table, and it has to land within two percent of Blackmagic's own published data rates. It runs 3,280 timecode round trips on every change. If my maths ever stops agreeing with theirs, the tests fail and I find out before you do.
• Nothing you type leaves your device. There is no server to send it to. Details are on the privacy page.

What fourteen years on set adds that a formula does not

A specification sheet will not tell you that a card never fills to its last byte, because a recorder needs room to close the file cleanly and will not risk a corrupt clip to gain nine seconds. It will not tell you that the estimate in an editing application's export window is arithmetic rather than a measurement, so it can disagree with the file you end up with. It will not tell you that two takes of the same length are rarely the same size, because most cameras write variable bitrate and a handheld pan across foliage costs the encoder far more than a locked off interview.

Those are the things that decide whether a day goes well, and they are scattered through this site next to the numbers they belong to. The safety margin field on the main calculator starts at zero on purpose. Ten percent is a habit that has kept me out of trouble, not a measured constant, and I am not going to dress up my habit as a specification. The tool asks you instead of deciding for you.

Where I am giving you an opinion from the set rather than a published fact, I say which one it is. That line matters more than anything else on the site.

How this is paid for

Axen Works is free and stays free. There is no account, no upgrade, no newsletter and no affiliate link, and I have no plan to add any of them. The site is intended to be funded by advertising, which is the arrangement that lets a tool like this stay open to everyone who needs it at two in the morning. Ad serving was not live on 22 August 2026, when this page was last updated. When ads do arrive, they will be clearly separated from the content, and what that means for cookies is written out in advance on the privacy page.

The address of this site

Axen Works is served at axenworks.com, and that is the only address it claims. Every canonical link, every social tag, every entry in the sitemap and every identifier in the structured data names that host and nothing else. If you find a page here pointing anywhere else, that is a bug and I want to hear about it.

This gets a section of its own because getting it wrong already cost this site something. On 22 August 2026 the site moved from one host to another, and the address that had been handed to Google for review was left behind answering a redirect and fifteen bytes on every path. A reviewer opened it, found no home page, no privacy policy and no contact page, and was right to record that the property served no content. The pages were fine. The address was not, and the pages might as well not have existed.

So the address is now written down in one file, checked on every build, and verified against the live site before anything is submitted anywhere. A matching domain name, axenworks.com, is registered and sitting parked at its registrar. It is deliberately not in use yet, because an address that stays put is worth more than an address that reads better, and this site has already paid once to learn that. If it ever does move, the move will appear in the version history below with the date and the reason, like any other change.

Version history

This site is new, and pretending otherwise would be the first lie on a site built to refuse them. It was written in August 2026. This list will stay honest about what changed and why, including the parts that were wrong the first time. This list will grow, because a calculator that quotes manufacturer documents has to record when it last read them and what changed when it did.

• Version 1.2, 22 August 2026. The application to Google AdSense was rejected, and the reason belongs here rather than in a quiet resubmission. The URL handed over for review was this site's previous address, which by then answered a redirect and a fifteen byte body on every path. Nothing was wrong with the pages; the reviewer never reached them, and correctly recorded that the property submitted served no content. The response is structural rather than cosmetic. The address this site claims now lives in one file with the date it was settled, the build fails if any page names a different one, and a new preflight check reads the exact URL that is about to be submitted, then refuses it if that URL leaves the host, if the sitemap it serves is empty, or if the policy pages cannot be reached from it. The same check now stands between ad code and the site: advertising cannot ship without a consent gate and a valid ads.txt landing in the same commit. Not a single calculator, number or source changed.
• Version 1.1, 22 August 2026. No change to a single number, a single source or a single word of a calculator. This one was structural, and it was a genuine mistake worth writing down rather than quietly fixing. Version 1.0 shipped with every page declaring, in its canonical link, its social tags and its structured data, that the real version of itself lived at a domain that was not serving the site. Search engines take that declaration literally, so the whole site was pointing its credit at an address where there was nothing to credit. Every page now names the host it is actually served from, and the address is written down in exactly one file instead of twenty six, so moving the site is one command and one verification rather than a hopeful search and replace. Two smaller things went with it. Opening a calculator no longer rewrites the address bar into a string of default parameters before you have touched anything, so the link you copy is the link you meant to copy. And the hub for the capacity pages moved up into the menu at the top, because a third of the site was reachable only from the bottom of the page.
• Version 1.0, 22 August 2026. First version. Seven calculators, seven capacity pages, and the sources page behind them. The Apple ProRes table was read from the April 2022 white paper, the Blackmagic figures from Blackmagic's own published calculator, and the GoPro chart from their support article of 04/09/2024. Every source was read on the day the page was written, and each one carries the document date and the date it was read on the sources page. Advertising was not live.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with a manufacturer publication, the manufacturer is right and I want to know about it. Send the page, the figure and the source, and I will correct it and note what changed. That is the whole arrangement, and it is the most useful email I can get.

Write to ulisses@openyourais.com or use the contact page.