Freelance videographer

You shoot a corporate video on Tuesday, a wedding on Saturday, and you're editing a brand campaign for a client all week. The footage from each one lives somewhere different. The drives go in a backpack and out of the backpack. Half your clients want raw deliverables, the other half don't, and you need to keep both groups archived for at least a year either way.

The workflow below is the one we've seen actually work for this shape of work. It's not the only way; it's a good default that you can adjust to your specifics.

Who this is for

• You shoot for paying clients, mostly solo or with one assistant or AC.
• You work in 4K H.265 or ProRes, occasionally raw, with shoots ranging from 50 GB to 500 GB.
• You don't have a dedicated post house. Editing happens on your own machine, on your own schedule, in Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut.
• You move drives between bag and desk, and you've at least once felt sick about “wait, where's the backup of that?”

The shape of the work

Every shoot generates more files than you can keep on your Mac long-term. Cards fill up faster than your internal SSD can absorb them. A typical week might involve 800 GB of fresh footage across two or three shoots, plus the project files, exports, and side assets that build up during editing. If you don't have a system for moving footage off your Mac and verifying it landed correctly, your machine fills up and you start improvising. Improvising is when files get lost.

The other defining feature: deliverables and raws have different lifespans. The deliverable is small (a few gigabytes) and lives forever. The raws are huge (hundreds of gigabytes) and only matter for re-edits, which may or may not happen. You need both, in different places, with different access patterns.

Failures we've seen happen to videographers who didn't set this up properly: a hard drive failed during a re-edit nine months later and there was no second copy; an SD card got reformatted before the offload was verified; a laptop was stolen with the only working copy of an unfinished project; a cloud account got suspended and the backup wasn't accessible for two weeks. Every one of these is preventable.

How to set Tusk up for this

The day-of workflow

What it looks like to come back from a shoot day and actually get the footage safe before bed.

Long-term archive habits

The setup above protects you for the duration of a project. The habits below protect you for the duration of your career.

• Sharpie every drive. Tape a label on every external drive and SD card. Write the same label that shows up in Tusk on it. When future-you stares at a stack of identical SSDs, you want to find the right one in 30 seconds, not by plugging in five of them.
• Designate a physical home for each drive. Active drives live on your desk or in your bag. Archive drives live in a drawer (or a fireproof safe, or a second location entirely). Cards live in a card wallet, formatted, ready for the next shoot. The mental cost of “where did I put that drive” adds up.
• Close out projects deliberately. When a project is fully delivered and paid, do the close-out ritual: re-check every backup destination from the project page, confirm everything shows verified, then run the bulk delete-local action to free your Mac. Move the project tag from active to delivered or archive.
• Re-check your archive twice a year. Plug in the drives that hold your archive, open Tusk, let it re-stat. The notification panel will tell you if anything has gone missing or changed. Catching bit rot or a failing drive at the year-three mark beats discovering it at the year-five panic moment.
• Retire drives before they fail.Most spinning drives start showing read errors before they die. SSDs are more abrupt. Either way: when a drive in your active rotation passes five years (or starts getting noisy), redistribute its files to a new drive and retire the old one. Tusk's redistribute action makes this a one-click operation per file or per project.

Things people in your spot forget

• Your Premiere or Resolve project file is the most important file in the project. It's also the smallest. Save it inside the primary folder so Tusk picks up every autosave. Don't keep it on the Desktop.
• LUTs, transitions, and color presets you've set up live in Adobe / Resolve's app support folder by default. They're not in your project folder and Tusk doesn't see them. Either copy your custom LUTs into the project folder for portability, or back them up separately (a Tusk project pointing at the LUTs folder works).
• Audio recorded separately on a Zoom or Tascam needs its own ingest pass. The ingest workflow above handles cards and external sources interchangeably, but you have to actually run it for the audio drive too. Make it part of the same end-of-day ritual.
• Don't delete the local copy of an active project just because the backups are verified. Keep working files local until the project ships. Bulk delete-local is for projects that have closed out, not projects in flight.
• If you keep raws for some clients but not others, tag projects with raws_kept at delivery time. Future-you reviewing storage usage will know which archives can be purged after the contractually required retention window without losing anything you promised to keep.
• Check your cloud destination's actual cost quarterly. B2 storage costs creep up as your archive grows. Most freelance videographers don't notice until they get an invoice three years in. A 30-second check in the provider's console keeps you ahead of it.