How to edit video without filling your SSD

Why your editing SSD fills up so fast

Modern codecs are heavy. One hour of 4K footage runs from about 45 GB in H.264 to about 400 GB in ProRes 422 HQ, and 8K raw goes far higher. A single week of shooting easily produces several terabytes, so a 2 TB laptop SSD fills up before you have finished the first cut.

The usual reactions all have a cost. Deleting footage is risky and sometimes irreversible. Buying more SSDs is expensive and clutters the desk. Offloading to a slow external HDD or a NAS frees the SSD but you cannot always edit smoothly from it. There is a better pattern, and it comes down to three rules.

Rule 1: edit from proxies, not originals

A proxy is a small, low resolution copy of a clip. Your NLE cuts on the proxy and keeps a link to the original for export. One hour of proxy is a few gigabytes instead of hundreds, so a whole project fits on the SSD with room to spare.

• Premiere Pro: H.264 720p proxies decode instantly on any modern GPU.
• DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro: ProRes Proxy keeps the codec consistent across Mac NLEs.
• Avid Media Composer: DNxHR LB is the native choice.

The catch: classic proxies still leave the full resolution originals sitting on your SSD next to them, so you have actually added files. The real win is keeping the originals off the local disk entirely.

Rule 2: keep the originals in the cloud, not on your disk

Store your originals in cloud storage and keep only light proxies locally. The masters stay safe and off your SSD, and you can reach them from any machine. Watch one detail: many clouds charge egress fees every time you read a file back, so a heavy edit month can double the bill. Object storage with zero egress avoids that trap.

Rule 3: stream the heavy clips instead of copying them

Some clips you only need to touch once, to check a shot at full resolution or to grade. Instead of downloading them, stream the original straight from the cloud through a virtual drive that the NLE reads as a local folder. Nothing lands on the SSD. The choice is per file: proxy the clips you cut all day, stream the few you review in full quality.

Keep your proxy cache lean

Proxies pile up across projects too. A single cache page that frees every proxy you have not pinned keeps the SSD tidy without hunting through folders. Pin the project you are on, clear the rest, and the disk stays under control.

How Sanbila does all three

Sanbila is desktop software built around exactly this pattern. Your originals live in the cloud on Cloudflare R2 with zero egress fees and an automatic Backblaze B2 backup. Proxies are generated on Sanbila's cloud, not your CPU, with seven presets (H.264, ProRes Proxy, DNxHR LB). For each file you choose a light local proxy for offline cutting or streaming of the original from a virtual drive (Dokan on Windows, WebDAV on macOS), and a cache page frees space in one click. It works with Premiere Pro (official plugin), DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro and Avid.