File transfer time
Also known as: copy time, offload time
How long it takes to move footage from a card to a working disk, the first delay of any editing session and the easiest to plan around.
Updated
What it means
Transfer is the step between filming and editing, and it is pure waiting. Nothing can be decided while it happens, which is why it feels longer than it is. The machine is busy and the person is not.
Three things set the figure. The card's read speed, the reader, and the disk being written to, and the slowest of the three decides everything. Upgrading the other two changes nothing at all.
Volume makes it significant. An SD card speed class rated for recording 4K is not necessarily fast to read, and a full card holds a great deal of data.
How it works in practice
Offloading while doing something else is the whole trick. Starting the copy before food, a drive home or a shower removes the delay from the editing session entirely. The copy needs no supervision.
Deleting on the card first shortens it directly. Obvious failures removed before the copy are failures that never get transferred or reviewed, which also helps Editing time.
A card reader beats a camera cable. Reading through the body is slower and drains a battery, and a reader is the single most effective piece of equipment for this. It is also the one nobody buys first.
What to watch out for
Verifying is skipped and should not be. A copy that reported success can still produce Corrupted frames, and the card gets formatted on the assumption that it worked. One bad file loses a session.
Formatting too early is the unrecoverable version. The card is the only copy until the transfer is verified, so Card formatting belongs after a check rather than before one.
Transfer over a network is slower than people expect. Resumable upload makes a long transfer survivable by surviving an interruption, which a plain copy over a connection does not.
How RawClip handles it
Uploading happens once and runs in the background, with a resumable transfer so a dropped connection does not restart it. The footage is analysed from that upload, which replaces the local copy-and-review step rather than adding another one to it. Nothing has to be transferred twice.