How to host and share your own footage and assets for free

If you’re starting a new video project and need to hand over your video assets to your editor, this short article will help you get everything in order to reduce costs and save your editor time – and as a result, receive a better final edit.

File preparation

Your original footage may be very large – from 5GB up to hundreds of GB, in some cases, more.

Before handing off the footage to your editor, it’s important to remove all clips you have already identified as unnecessary for your project. You could take it one step further by organizing footage into events or dates which have a linear progression in your final video.

Smaller file sizes – allow you to upload your footage to a free service such as Google Drive, or fit within one of our free private customer upload folders.

Less overall footage length – saves your editor time when downloading, as well as reviewing your footage to pick out the best clips – this saved time can be used to create an even better video.

Zipping/compressing files

Zipping or compressing your files is very easy and has a few important benefits.

It can reduce the file size of your total assets – but results vary depending on the files being compressed and the operating system or program doing the compressing.

Converts multiple files into a single file – this is super important:

  1. It makes uploading and downloading faster and more convenient.
  2. Some file hosting services struggle when trying to download large numbers of files at once (looking at you, Google Drive).
  3. You can be sure when your editor downloads the ZIP, they have everything you put in there.

Uploading to a file hosting service

There’s no single best solution here. You may already have a free or paid account with Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud, etc – Feel free to use one of those if you have enough space. However, if you don’t already have a place to host your files, consider the following:

  • Dropbox (free up to 2GB, or plans starting at $9.99 per month for 2TB)
  • Google Drive (free up to 15GB, $1.99 per month for 100GB)
  • WeTransfer (free up to 2GB, $10.00 per month for 1TB)
  • Apple iCloud (free up to 2GB, $1.00 per month for 50GB)
  • Microsoft OneDrive (free up to 5GB, $1.99 per month for 100GB)

Once your file(s) are uploaded, copy the share link and you’re ready to provide that in your video request.