DirectConnect

Guides

How to move footage from a laptop to an editing desktop

The fastest way is a Thunderbolt or USB4 cable straight from the laptop to the desktop, copying whole card folders and checking them before you wipe any cards. Without those ports on both computers, use a fast portable SSD or wired Ethernet.

Why this is harder than it should be

  • The files are huge. A day of 4K or 6K footage can run to hundreds of gigabytes. Over Wi-Fi that takes hours, and through the cloud it can take a day.
  • There are thousands of small ones too. Camera folders, proxies, thumbnails, audio and project caches add thousands of small files, and network file sharing slows right down on them.
  • The SSD shuffle copies everything twice. Laptop to SSD, then SSD to desktop, doubles the time and needs a drive big enough for the whole shoot.
  • A cable still needs network file sharing. You turn on sharing, set up an account and password, find a 169.254 address and sign in from the other computer.
  • Network shares drop mid-copy. A laptop going to sleep or the cable coming out stops a long copy, and you’re left working out which files made it.
  • You can’t afford a bad copy. Footage often exists in one place until it reaches the edit drive, so every transfer needs checking before cards are wiped.
  • Mac laptop, Windows workstation. Drive formats don’t cross over, and each system’s sharing settings and sign-in rules are different.

Before you move anything

  • Keep the camera cards until the footage is on the desktop and checked.
  • Copy whole card folders, not individual clips, so your editing software can read the camera’s metadata.
  • Use an offload tool that verifies with checksums, or compare file counts and total sizes at the end.
  • Plug the laptop into power, so it doesn’t run down or sleep during a long copy.

Set up a direct cable

This needs Thunderbolt 3 or newer, or USB4, on both the laptop and the desktop, and a Thunderbolt or USB4 cable such as a 40 Gbps cable. Check your ports with how to tell if your laptop has Thunderbolt or USB4. When you connect the cable, each computer sees a new network connection: Thunderbolt Bridge on a Mac, an Ethernet adapter on Windows.

Share the footage folder on the laptop, then connect to it from the desktop and copy onto the edit drive.

Share the footage from a Mac laptop

  1. Open System Settings, choose General, then Sharing, and turn on File Sharing.
  2. Click the info button next to File Sharing. Under Shared Folders, click + and add the folder that holds the footage.
  3. Under Users, check that your account has Read & Write or Read Only access. You sign in from the desktop with this account’s name and password.
  4. If the desktop runs Windows, click Options, select your account under Windows File Sharing and enter its password. Without this, Windows can’t sign in.
  5. In System Settings, choose Network, then Thunderbolt Bridge, then Details. Note the IP address under TCP/IP. It starts with 169.254.
  6. Optional: in System Settings, choose Battery, then Options, and turn on Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.

A 169.254 address and a “Self-assigned IP” status are normal for a direct cable. There’s no router to hand out addresses.

Share the footage from a Windows laptop

  1. Open Settings, choose Network & internet, then Ethernet, and select the connection that appeared with the cable. Set Network profile type to Private network. Windows treats new connections as Public, which blocks file sharing.
  2. In Network & internet, choose Advanced network settings, then Advanced sharing settings. Under Private networks, turn on Network discovery and File and printer sharing.
  3. In File Explorer, right-click the footage folder, choose Properties, open the Sharing tab and click Share. Add your account and click Share.
  4. Back on the cable’s Ethernet page in Settings, note the IPv4 address. It usually starts with 169.254.
  5. Optional: in Settings, choose System, then Power & battery, and set the sleep time for when it’s plugged in to Never.

You sign in from the desktop with this Windows account’s user name and password. If you sign in to Windows with a PIN, use the Microsoft account password, not the PIN.

Connect from the desktop and copy

Connect by the 169.254 address you noted, not by picking the laptop from a list of computers.

On a Mac desktop

  1. In Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server.
  2. Type smb:// followed by the laptop’s address, for example smb://169.254.10.20, and click Connect.
  3. Choose Registered User, enter the laptop’s user name and password, and click Connect.
  4. Select the shared folder and click OK. It opens in Finder and appears in the sidebar.

On a Windows desktop

  1. In File Explorer’s address bar, type \\ followed by the laptop’s address, for example \\169.254.10.20, and press Enter.
  2. When Windows asks for network credentials, enter the laptop’s user name and password.
  3. Open the shared folder.

On a Linux desktop

  1. In Settings, open the cable’s wired connection and set IPv4 Method to Link-Local Only.
  2. In Files, choose Other Locations.
  3. Under Connect to Server, type smb:// followed by the laptop’s address and click Connect.
  4. Choose Registered User and enter the laptop’s user name and password.

Copy and check

Copy the whole card folders from the share onto the edit drive. A command-line copy can be run again after an interruption and skips the files that already arrived. In Terminal on a Mac:

rsync -a --progress "/Volumes/Footage/Day 1/" "/Volumes/Edit/Day 1"

In Terminal on Windows:

robocopy "\\169.254.10.20\Footage\Day 1" "E:\Edit\Day 1" /E /Z

Replace the paths with your own share and edit drive. Both commands add or update files in the destination folder and don’t delete anything. When the copy ends, compare file counts and sizes, or run your offload tool’s verify, before you wipe any cards.

What goes wrong with a cable share

  • Public network blocks sharing. If the desktop can’t find the laptop, check that the Windows laptop’s cable connection is set to Private network.
  • The copy can use Wi-Fi instead. If you connect by the laptop’s name, the desktop may reach it over Wi-Fi. Connect by the 169.254 address so the copy stays on the cable.
  • Small files are slow. In our tests over a 10 Gb/s link, Finder copied one 4 GiB file from a Mac to a Linux computer’s shared folder in 4.5 seconds, but took almost four minutes for 20,000 small files.
  • Windows signs every request. Windows 11 version 24H2 requires SMB signing by default when it connects to a share, which adds work to each request.
  • Sleep, restarts and unplugging end the connection. Afterwards you connect and sign in again, and a copy in progress stops part way.
  • The address can change. The self-assigned address can be different after you reconnect the cable, so check it again if a saved address stops working.

For more on drops, see keeping a shared folder connected after sleep. For Mac-to-Mac options such as Share Disk, see transferring files with Thunderbolt, and for mixed setups, transferring files between Windows and Mac.

Without Thunderbolt or USB4 ports

A fast portable SSD

Copy to an NVMe SSD in a 10 Gb/s or faster enclosure, then copy from it to the desktop. Format it as exFAT if the two computers run different operating systems: a Mac can’t write to NTFS drives, and Windows can’t read Mac-formatted (APFS) drives. It needs no network setup, but every file is copied twice.

A wired network share

If both computers are on wired Ethernet, use the same sharing steps as above with each computer’s normal network address. Most office networks run at 1 Gb/s, so 500 GB takes over an hour, and longer with many small files.

What to avoid

  • Wi-Fi for anything larger than a few gigabytes.
  • Cloud sync as the main path from shoot to edit, unless you have a very fast upload.
  • Dragging clips out of camera folders, which breaks metadata and spanned clips.