Upload vs Hard Drives
We shot video for our clients recently and was asked to upload the video. That’s not a problem for small files under 2 gigs. Nowadays most of our shoots have many gigs of video. Especially when we are shooting 4K or better. Many video companies use Comcast or AT&T for their internet. At best, you may get between 15 to 30 Mbps upload speed. That makes it very tedious to upload 10 to 100 gigs of raw footage.
At Sullivan Productions our typical work flow is to put the video onto a hard drive or thumb drive and send it overnight to our clients. Before we send the drive we back up the file on a keeper drive just in case something happens to the clients drive. We keep those back up files for at least three months.
Here is a table that shows how long it would take to upload: 1GB, 100GB, and 1 TB with different internet speeds. These are the speeds that Google Fiber advertises.
| 1 GB | 100 GB | 1000 GB | |
| 1Mbps | 2.5 hrs | 10 days | 99 days |
| 2Mbps | 1.25 hrs | 5 days | 50 days |
| 5Mbps | 28 min | 2 days | 20.3 days |
| 10Mbps | 14 min | 1 day | 10.2 days |
| 20Mbps | 7 min | 12 hrs | 5.1 days |
| 1000Mbps | 8 sec | 15 min | 2.5 hrs |
The calculations are rounded to the nearest minute and include 10 percent connection overhead. Keep in mind that if your overhead is more than 10 percent, then your transmission times will be even greater than the data presented in our table.
There are many sites that will let you put large files up to share with the client but the average files size would need to be less than 5 gigs. As you can see, it’s the upload speed that makes this process difficult.
