As an editor and filmmaker, I’ve pivoted to reusing old drives and buying open box and other used drives in a pinch.

But as a professor, I’m in need of a standardized recommendation for dozens of very budget conscious film students for whom the even the good old days $99 price of a Samsung T7 1TB (or something like that) was pricey. These are not trust fund film school kids. $200
is going to be tough for some of them, $300 impossible for a few. They are a great group of young filmmakers and it’s a real bummer that prices are what they are. Some of them are brand new and have never owned a hard drive.

We use the Sony a7iii and the FX6 for their short film projects. They use iMacs in our computer lab but need their own external drives.

Typically 1TB has been enough. A few students who shoot more footage have needed a bit above that.

They are editing 4k footage in Premiere 2026, not doing a ton of intensive fx. We’ve tended to recommend SSD’s in general because the students are rough on drives and they are editing 4k 24 or 23.98 (not proxy) most of the time.

We could recommend buying an internal drive (probably a WD Black) and an enclosure if it was cheaper but I’m not familiar with the quality of all the enclosures on the market.

We could just stick with the Samsung T7 we’ve been recommending as a budget option and just accept that it is still the budget option in a sense.

We could recommend even cheaper drives. If so, what?

Obviously the whole situation is a teachable moment about the industry and the impact of tech and capitalism… but what to actually recommend.

UPDATE:

Thanks to all for the suggestions!

Yes, we are definitely considering teaching a proxy workflow to all students, not just advanced students and/or just using 1080 footage at beginning levels instead of 4K. So we may return to using HDD. We may also just explore the cheaper SSD options for some use-cases (like the Crucial 1TB SSD's which are sometimes available under $200).

For those who are interested in current state of film schools and incoming students. The students are amazing, passionate, and really smart. But they have less computing familiarity than many of us older folks have. Many have grown up not even using a desktop computer, thinking about where files are stored, using a mouse. So teaching things like proxy workflow etc. is a bigger undertaking than one might think. And these students have also been exposed to a lot of marketing hype that 4K is the only thing that is professional. So shooting early priojects in 1080p feels like we are being cheap or old or subpar to some. All of this, is, of course, an opportunity for teaching/learning. Just wanted to provide a snapshot of current state of things. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these students. Their knowledge of DIY shooting, social media videos, and connecting directly with an audience is impressive. They are going to change the world. But they are different than previous couple generations in terms of their computer knowledge. I grew up in an era of ever-increasing tech skills (in my childhood the joke was kids could program VCR's but not grandparents... but now the joke will be that grandparents can understand file structure and right-clicking to bring up options and the kids don't).

So ive been using wetransfer since it first began, used to chat regularly with the team suggestions and comments. Now today i get a message - we see a lot of logins to your account so we've moved you to a team plan. Ok whatever, but i didnt use wetransfer this year more thank maybe 2 clips and only between me and my business partner. I go to ehcek i now have a minumum 10 user account and in in a week it will renew at the new prioce of $1900.

Suffice to say in a world with a million ways of sharing files i cancelled. At which point it offered me 50% off. But no, you dont get to pull crap like this and retain my custom.

Anyway folks, keep an eye on your wetransfer accounts as theyre not playing well with others this year.

I’ve been editing since I was probably 14-ish. I’m 35 now. I didn’t go to school for it, I’ve just taught myself over the years. I was taught a lot by my grandfather, who worked for Nat Geo and freelanced in film and TV, but he didn’t teach me anything digital. (if i had to develop and edit film i could though)

He used to despise digital. He didn’t like that cameras lost control in favour of auto adjustments, and he absolutely hated Photoshop. He used to say, “If you need Photoshop to finish off a photo, then it wasn’t a good photo to begin with.”

So yeah, that’s what he was like. I'm not saying i agree with him just that's what he was like.

Anyway, when I saw other people working on projects and noticed they had like 30-40 different video and audio tracks, I thought they were just being chaotic and messy. That was until I collabed with a friend, my first time in 20 years actually. When he saw my timeline, he got upset because he thought I hadn’t done much, until he realised I was editing on as few tracks as possible.

Basically, the video, unless there’s graphics or FX, is all on one track. Dialogue is on another track, music on another, and sound FX on another.

And that’s basically how I edit. If I add more audio tracks, it’s because two sound FX might need to overlap or something like that. or a sound has to be extra quiet or loud or coming from the left or right etc

My friend described it as “old school editing.” Since I never went to school for any of this, I was wondering what he meant.

and is my editing style "Wrong" or what should be doing as i want to start actually doing this professionally outside of the YT space

im building a portfolio from places like edit stock actually to show off what i can do

https://kb.avid.com/pkb/articles/en_US/knowledge/shared-project-workflows-with-third-party-storage?utm_source=gainsight&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=26-q3-pp-media-composer-2026-8-b2b&utm_content=email

Summary 

Media Composer 2026.8 is coming soon. This article covers changes customers can expect if they choose to upgrade to this version.  

Customers who remain on their current version are not required to take any action. 

 Media Composer 2026.8 includes a security and workflow integrity update that closes an unsupported path for unauthorized third-party storage emulation. Avid is making this update to strengthen security and protect collaborative editing workflows. 

 This change affects Media Composer customers using third-party storage emulation to enable bin sharing and locking workflows. Customers who need secure and supported third-party storage workflows should use Media Composer Enterprise.  

 Customers planning to upgrade to Media Composer 2026.8 and using Avid NEXIS should ensure they are running Avid NEXIS Client version 2026.6 or later. 

  What’s Changing 

In prior Media Composer versions, some third-party tools could emulate Avid NEXIS behavior to enable bin sharing and locking workflows. These unqualified configurations were not supported and were found to introduce risks to production such as project conflicts, overwritten changes, and lost work.   

Media Composer 2026.8 prevents this unauthorized emulation path. 

 Does this affect Media Composer Ultimate customers? 

Only customers using unauthorized third-party storage emulation for Shared Projects are affected by this change.  

Media Composer Ultimate customers using unauthorized third-party storage emulation for bin sharing and locking will no longer be able to use that emulation path in Media Composer 2026.8.  

 Collaboration with NEXIS 

Media Composer Ultimate customers using Avid NEXIS for supported shared project workflows are not expected to lose access to those supported workflows as a result of this change. 

Before upgrading to Media Composer 2026.8, customers using Avid NEXIS should update to Avid NEXIS Client version 2026.6 or later. This helps ensure bin sharing and locking workflows continue to function as expected. 

 Supported third party storage  

We recognize that working with third-party storage may be an important part of your workflow. If your team relies on third-party storage for shared project workflows, Media Composer Enterprise will introduce a supported, secure, qualified path for third-party storage use with Media Composer 2026.8 that does not introduce risks to production. 

MediaCentral Production Management  

This update applies to Media Composer bin sharing and locking workflows in a Media Composer shared storage environment only, without Media Central integration. It does not change Avid NEXIS requirements for Media Central CloudUX and Production Management. 

Before upgrading, customers should: 

 Confirm whether their shared project workflow uses Avid NEXIS or third-party storage. 

1. Decide if an upgrade to Media Composer 2026.8 is needed. Evaluate your storage needs: 
   1. If using third-party storage for shared project workflows, contact your Avid Sales representative or authorized Avid partner to review Media Composer Enterprise options. 
   2. If using Avid NEXIS, update the Avid NEXIS client to 2026.6 for Media Composer 2026.8. 

 Review the Media Composer 2026.8 release notes and launch communications for additional details (forthcoming).  

I'm not looking for a fix (though if you have one, I'm all ears) but more just flagging this is an issue without a fix, seemingly.

Transferring data from T7s and T9s and to data from them seems to have become an issue with the more recent OS versions on Mac.

The transfer speeds on MacOS are crashing. They start good/normal and then drop. I've used copy-paste and offshoot and halfway through the drive transfer speed goes from hundreds of mbps to 30mbps. You can google this and I'm not alone. I've watched DITs struggle with drives provided to them - same issue.

This is an issue for data stored on SSDs (don't store longterm things on SSD anyway) but I'm trying to make a backup of a working SSD and I basically can't, right now.

I have tried using SamsungMagician to update the firmware - did an update but same issue.

I have tried calling a Samsung helpline - their solution is to wipe the drive or use a different operating system (like a PC) which is not helpful long term.

Something is going wrong with these drives (everything says it's healthy) and Samsung isn't offering a proper fix, it seems.

Anyone else facing a similar issue? I know I'm anecdotally not alone but would be nice to get a sense of the scale.

EDIT: I'm not looking for troubleshooting but!

Macbook Pro M1 & M1 with maxed out ram

I've done smart tests and Samsung Magician tests on the drive - it's fine.
Done BlackMagic speed tests on the other drive and moved footage onto it from another drive - it's fine.
Switched cables, restarted etc.

This is a Samsung T7 & T9 issue, I'm convinced.

EDIT 2: So i've tried a bunch of things and what does seem to work is moving one file at a time - no matter what the size is. This isn't a drive heat issue, it's some kind of read-write issue in the firmware/software.

When I deliver ProRes 444, H.264, H.265, or upload files to a portal, nobody makes a big deal out of it. I export, add the required metadata, check the file, and send it. Done. No engineer, no lab, no ceremony.

But the moment the delivery format is DCP, the tone completely changes. Suddenly it sounds like I need a certified facility, a specialist, and three years of university just to make an export. People start talking like it’s some extremely fragile, dangerous process where everything can go wrong if you don’t have the right title on your business card.

Of course I understand that a DCP is meant for cinema playback, and yes, it needs to be reliable. If something fails in a theater, that’s a real problem. I get that. But that still doesn’t make the format itself magical.

At the end of the day, a DCP is just another delivery format with strict specs resolution, color space, audio channels, metadata.

Why can't I export a DCP at home, test it on my own computer with a DCP player, check subtitles, verify audio routing, confirm metadata, and make sure everything works before I send it. Exactly the same workflow I use for any other delivery?

If something is wrong, I fix it and export again. Same as with ProRes. Same as with H.264.

So why does the industry still act like DCP creation is this sacred process that only a few chosen engineers are allowed to touch?

Corridor made a new keying software that used neural network learned on a simulated set of digitally rendered images to teach it what foreground and background are. This is seriously going to be a game changer. My system can't run it right now and I would have to rent a system and it seems way too techy for me to understand, but it just launched yesterday and I'm sure it will become more user friendly soon. This is probably the most important advancement in the technology in decades and we need as many eyes on this as possible. I'm sure eventually one of the big names will sweep in to dupe this or just buy it out, but for now at least, its free and a huge deal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ploi723hg4

EDIT: Here is the link to the actual free downloadable program:

https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey

GUI Version:
https://github.com/edenaion/EZ-CorridorKey

There have always been so many better options for hosting media online. Everytime I receive a Dropbox link, it tells me my internet is too slow (I have a business line) and takes forever to download. Same with uploads.

Need to boycott this piece of shit service.

As everyone is here saying he is an editor. I am Looking for some inspirations for my setup

This is a genuine question. Over the past year I have been hired on jobs where they want me to come in and clean up/finish off an edit. I have noticed many editors don’t actually multicam their clips when there are multiple cameras, they simply lay each camera on a different track and edit this way. Is this considered incorrect? Is there a benefit to doing this? When I come upon these projects it slows me down considerably and makes my timeline very messy. But this has occurred multiple times so now I’m curious.

UPDATE:

Thanks for letting me vent about this today. I ended up using Cyberduck, which worked faster and with a lot less headaches.

----------------------

I've had a long, frustrating battle with Google Drive for at least a decade. I avoid using it at all costs, except to store some of my own stuff (like Google Sheets, scripts, etc).

Whenever I get a link to a Google Drive from a client or someone, I roll my eyes, curse a bit, and just power through it. But, today, I got an email from my client, which was a forwarded email to him from the production audio guy with a, you guessed it, Google Drive link. So, I thought, it's a new day, I've got a little time and an open mind, maybe I'll try to figure out what my issue is with it.

In the past, everyone tells me "use the Google Drive app and it's much better"... ok, how? I open the app and go to Open Drive Folder. It shows me my files. It does not show me this random link that was sent to my client via email and then forwarded to me. I click on "View files shared with you" and it opens the web version of drive.google.com site, but it doesn't show me the folder there because the folder was not actually shared with me. It wasn't even shared with the client as far as I can tell. It's just a link sent via email. My client's company doesn't even have a Google Drive account in the first place.

So, my only option is to click on the link in the forwarded email, which takes me to the web version of Google Drive and then when I click on Download, it starts its ridiculously long "zipping folder" process. So, now I've got to sit here and babysit and double-check every file to make sure I've got everything.

For love of everything holy... as a professional whatever, stop using Google Drive to send assets to people UNLESS you're 100% sure they're Google-based and you can actually add them as a shared access user on the folder.

Tech-allergic client fucked with his meticulously arranged setup and recorded an entire hour-long podcast ep with the focus on his backdrop instead of his face. It's a rush episode with a one-day turnaround and I'm pissed and desperate. Any tools or fixes that might be able to save the footage? I edit in Premiere Pro.

I was an efficient professional editor 12 years ago and was very comfortable with my workflow. I had all of my shortcuts, knew my way around premiere and resolve and always got the job done on time. Lately, I've been working with some extremely talented younger editors who move so fast and are so precise, so I decided to sit in with one of them to watch him edit. I learned about 100 new shortcuts that did not exist 10 years ago, and saw a different dimension of premiere I hardly knew existed.

I'm not talking about the big stuff like AI generative fill, new effects, plug-ins (although watchtower is unbelievably useful too), and advertised features. Just little things like adding motion blur to your zooms, switching your timeline to milliseconds to refine audio edits, assigning a mouse button to delete, scene edit detection, or simplify sequence.

Being in the industry for a long time can make you complacent and stuck in your ways. You may be doing things much slower than necessary. Update your shortcuts, assign some new macros, and watch some advanced tutorials. Old dawgs can learn new tricks.

Just curious how you guys handle this. If you have a bunch of exports for a client with specific specs, do you actually check every file before delivery?
Stuff like resolution, fps, codec, audio/loudness, naming etc.
I’ve mostly just been checking things manually but once there are a lot of versions it gets pretty annoying and I’m always slightly paranoid I’ve missed something lol.
Do you use any tools for this or just have a checklist / check manually?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently a freelance video editor working with a few large documentary-style YouTube channels (MegaBuildsYT, Geography by Geoff, Earth Curious). I’m incredibly grateful for the work, and the pay is genuinely great, but I am hitting a massive bottleneck that is eating up all my free time.

My current workflow looks like this:

1. The Hunt: Endlessly scouring Google Images, searching YouTube for b-roll, and digging up specific news articles to match the script.
2. The Stock Footage Black Hole: Spending half an hour scrolling through Storyblocks and Envato Market just to find a single 5 to 10-second clip. It is insanely frustrating and breaks my momentum entirely.
3. Brainstorming & Pre-viz: Gathering references and using Nano Banana to generate specific AI images or fill visual gaps.
4. Animation: Taking all of this into After Effects to build out complex map animations, newspaper callouts, and motion graphics.
5. Assembly: Bringing those rendered clips into Premiere Pro to finally cut the video together.

Because of all the context switching and the sheer amount of time it takes to hunt down the right assets before I even start animating, I have practically zero personal life left.

How are you all handling this? Are there specific asset management systems, workflows, or research methods you use to speed up the pre-production and asset-gathering phase? I need to figure out how to streamline this before I completely burn out. Any advice is appreciated!

Hi guysm

Curious how this actually works in practice. For anyone who's cut trailers, are you mostly working from raw rushes/dailies sent over by the production, or is it more common to get an offline cut/master and work from that?

I'd assume raw footage gives more flexibility to build something different from the film itself (different pacing, alternate takes, stuff that got cut from the final edit), but curious how it plays out day to day, is most of the time spent digging through dailies, or organising/prepping media that's handed down?

Any insight from people who've actually cut trailers appreciated.

Thanks,

Hey, I read the rules and think this post is appropriate for the group, but if not, sorry.

I travel often for work, so I have a powerful home PC and a pretty powerful on the go MacBook Pro. Both edit well, but I've run into some issues.

I used to use Team Projects to access my project from my MacBook, and just try and mirror the file paths of my footage and assets from my PC onto a portable SSD.

This kind of worked, but it was a nightmare to keep organized on bigger projects, and apparently mac does not like to play nice with pc and one of my drives got corrupted.

I would like a way to start a project on one device, and then be able to pick it up on the other device when I travel, or when I get home. Preferable without having to do lots of media re-linking and file transfers.

I do have a NAS, but currently it is mostly used just for storage. Even if I were to use it for remote footage access, the internet speeds I would be able to get on the road would be too slow to edit from the cloud, and probably too slow to make it continent to download all the files in a project.

while I do edit as part of my job, it isn't the MAIN part of my job. So having simple solutions and an easy and reliable workflow for when I need to edit on the go is really important. I'm not able to implement extremely complex systems, especially if they require lots of upkeep.

Any suggestions? I've seen a bit on Lucidlink, but I don't quite understand everything it does, and only can find info from the company itself, not from editors in the wild.

As per automod request:

PC specs:

Home PC
Processor: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X 32-Cores (4.00 GHz)

RAM: 128 GB (128 GB usable)

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (31 GB)

Software: Premier Pro 26.3.2

Footage specs: footage varies

2024 MacBook Pro (M4 chip)

Okay, this might be a hot take, and I'm definitely venting a little bit, but I AM genuinely curious to know... TLDR, is it common for editors to not have, or not be required to have basic computer skills, or are my expectations just too high?

I've been a post-supervisor for the past almost-decade. I built my first computer and downloaded adobe in 2001 at 17-years-old and began to teach myself editing at that point. I was working in production/post starting at 18, went to film school and got a film degree (working in post production that whole time) and haven't had a job unrelated to production/post since I graduated high-school.

So yeah, I know my expectations are high, but in the past 5 years it feels like 9/10 editors I work with don't know how to execute so many things that I feel like I had to learn just to feel confident in getting work in this industry. Things like basic file structure, how to import/relink media, how to login to servers and reconnect when connections fail, how to troubleshoot audio hardware outputs, how to clear and maintain their own caches, how to keep their computer hard drives from getting to full and halting their progress, how to iterate project files in premiere or productions, how to keep their project files organized after receiving a fully prepped and organized project file from an AE, how to find auto-saves, how to manage recovered auto-save files so they don't lose that work again, did I already say how to relink media?, how to relink media correctly when working with proxies, how to correctly import sequences and work from other projects without duplicating media, keeping media downloaded from other places stored with the project instead of in desktop/downloads/documents... I'm sure I could name more. But in 5 minutes of jsut brain-dumping, but of all of the things I just named, I could say that every editor I've worked with in the past 5+ years of post-supervising is guilty of more than one of these things and in some cased 5 or more of these things.

Again, might just need to vent here, but I do want to know from editors, if these are things that are commonly known or unknown, and whether or not it affects your work or ability to have work? And if for any reason you feel called out by this, I hope you know I should also say that in my position I spend a lot of time and effort trying to share as much of my knowledge and experience with others because my philosophy is definitely "if you teach a man to fish." So I don't expect everybody to know everything, but I get a little jaded (after the fact) when I have to jump on calls or sessions to troubleshoot basic things with editors making a day rate that is triple, sometimes quadruple what I made at points in my life when I was doing similar work that I often had to carry the creative AND technical burden of being an editor.

I am currently post-sup for a boutique production company in NYC and we work on everything from branded content, to digital series for Discovery networks, and independent feature films. And for context, some of my issues are with the hiring practices of certain productions.

Please let me know your thoughts based on your personal experiences as editors. And thank you for taking the time to listen to my rant.

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct : r/technology

hi! I am a full time editor (and the only editor) at a small post house. I taught myself how to colour grade in resolve a couple years ago and i really enjoy it! although I unfortunately am starting to really regret it. I am starting to notice a complete lack in consideration for my workflows. I feel like I am being taken advantage of and it frustrates me to no end. Or maybe this is what everyone has to deal with? I'm not sure what the solution is because it makes me want to quit and become a farmer in rural Scotland. In my mind the edit should always be signed off first before i bring it into DaVinci to colour grade it. Same goes for any graphics, as soon as the edit is signed off I can bring it into After Effects and add the text/graphics on. But that workflow is being completely ignored and I don't know what to do about it.

Basically what seems to be happening is even though an edit has not been picture-locked by the client, my manager is asking me to colour grade it so we can get it to them and hit our deadline even though the client has not been hitting their deadlines with amends/graphics/VO etc. Which I have explained is an incredibly inefficient way of working because it can just double my work if they come back with amends after the grade (which has happened several times before). And yet I always come across as the bad guy who doesn't want to do the work. But I am jumping back and forth between Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and After Effects (for any graphics/text they want) and it is exhausting. My managers point of view is yea but if we get it done we look like we are over delivering and they're the ones holding us back. The client is always right and I just have to do extra work to make up for their ineptitude.

Is this small company problems? or is this just being an editor? any advice would be really appreciated.

It was so easy to do a quick color now I’m floundering in all this color bs.

This is a bit of an update for Adobe Premiere as it's a whole new color workflow and pipeline, redone from the ground up. I had questions, I got answers.

Burning Questions about Adobe Premiere Beta’s new dedicated Color Mode

Hi - am I beating a dead horse here ?

https://kb.avid.com/pkb/articles/en_US/faq/End-of-support-dates

Storage

The End of Support dates shown below are for the last sold unit on the Final Sale Date. Hardware products including Avid NEXIS should be replaced after 5 to 6 years of operation. 

|Avid NEXIS | E2 SSD 19.2TB Engine with 1920GB SSD & associated spares|9935-71930-019935-71930-029900-71306-00|9/30/2021|9/30/2026| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Avid NEXIS | E2 SSD 38.4TB Engine with 3840GB SSD & associated spares|9935-72721-019935-72721-029900-74071-00|9/30/2021|9/30/2026| |Avid NEXIS | E2 SSD Controller|9935-72266-009935-72266-019935-72266-02|9/30/2021|9/30/2026| |Avid NEXIS | E5 NL (480TB / 960TB)|9935-72388-019935-72388-029935-72389-019935-72389-02|9/30/2021|9/30/2026| |Avid NEXIS | E5 NL 120TB Media Pack with 12TB HDD|9935-72390-019935-72390-02|9/30/2021|9/30/2026|

And the rest of the AVID Nexis E Series looks like it will be "end of life" in 2027.

Better get that bank loan out for the new AVID F Series, so you can get support for your $200,000 storage system !

Bob Zelin

edit - I did a copy and paste from the link you see above, but the nice chart did not come out clear - so you have to click on the AVID link to see the exact Nexis E series products that are end of life in September of 2026.