Sending Raw Video Footage to an Editor: Sizes, Formats and Tips

Video is where “large file” stops meaning a few hundred megabytes and starts meaning a whole hard drive. If you’re a shooter handing footage to an editor, or an editor collecting rushes from several people, here’s what to plan for.

How big is footage, really?

Rough figures per hour of footage:

Source	Approx. size per hour
Phone, 1080p (HEVC)	3 to 6 GB
Phone, 4K 30fps (HEVC / “High Efficiency”)	~10 GB
Phone, 4K 30fps (H.264 / “Most Compatible”)	~20 GB
Mirrorless, 4K long-GOP (H.264/H.265, 100–150 Mbps)	45 to 70 GB
4K ProRes 422	~210 GB
4K ProRes 422 HQ	~320 GB
Cinema RAW formats	anywhere from 300 GB to well over 1 TB

These are ballpark numbers. Bitrates vary with frame rate and settings. But they show why a two-camera interview shoot in ProRes can easily come to 500 GB.

Originals or proxies?

Proxies are small, lightweight copies of your footage that the editor cuts with. When the edit’s locked, the project is relinked to the full-quality originals for the final export.

• Send proxies first when the originals are huge and the editor needs to start soon. A proxy set might be a tenth of the size of the originals, sometimes less. They can start cutting while the originals follow.
• Send originals straight away when the footage is already compact (phone or mirrorless long-GOP), or the editor is also grading and needs full quality from day one.

If you make proxies, keep the file names and folder structure identical to the originals. That’s what lets the editing software relink them later. Renaming anything breaks it.

Organise before you send

Editors will thank you for this:

• One folder per camera and per card (A-Cam/Card01, B-Cam/Card01), straight off the cards, without renaming clips.
• Audio in its own folder if you recorded separately, with a note about which camera it syncs with.
• A short notes file: frame rate, any cards that had issues, which takes the director liked.

Don’t transcode or “tidy” the original files. Copy them exactly as they came off the card, including the camera’s folder structure where possible. Some cameras store important metadata alongside the clips.

Getting it there

For a few gigabytes, anything works. For hundreds of gigabytes, you’re choosing between three options:

1. Ship a drive. Still unbeatable for multiple terabytes, or when either side has slow internet. Copy to a fast SSD, courier it, done. Always keep your own copy until the editor confirms the drive works.
2. Upload to a cloud service. Fine if your upload is fast, but you upload everything before the editor can download anything. On a typical 20 to 40 Mbps home upload, 300 GB takes the better part of a day. Worth doing the maths before you start.
3. Transfer directly. The footage streams from your machine to theirs, so they receive it while you send it. There’s no separate upload step. With BoltShare there’s no size limit, and transfers resume if either connection drops, which matters a lot when a job runs overnight.

For direct transfers of big shoots:

• Zip each camera folder (with Store, not compression, since video doesn’t compress) and send them as separate transfers. If something goes wrong with one, you haven’t lost the whole thing.
• Wire both ends into Ethernet.
• Stop the sending machine from sleeping. On Windows, set Sleep to Never while plugged in. On a Mac, use the caffeinate command in Terminal, or an app like Amphetamine. A laptop that dozes off at 3am stops the transfer. See keeping a transfer running.

Confirm before you wipe cards

This is the rule people learn the painful way: don’t format a card until the footage exists in at least two places, and the editor has confirmed it opens. A transfer that “finished” is not the same as a file that’s been opened and scrubbed through. For the really important stuff, compare checksums on both ends.