Sanbila for documentary editors

Keep five hundred hours of rushes in the cloud, cut on a laptop, conform on a finishing station.

What slows down a documentary post

Hundreds of hours of footage across multiple shoots, often spanning two to three years of production.
Constant juggling between external SSDs and RAID arrays to find a specific take from an interview shot eighteen months ago.
Sync logs in Resolve that break the moment the project moves between an edit suite and a freelance editor at home.
A colorist who needs the raw camera files but cannot wait for a 4 TB drive to be shipped across the country.

How Sanbila fits a documentary edit

You upload the originals once, from the field hard drives, the moment the shoot wraps. From then on every editor on the project opens the same Sanbila virtual folder and sees the same media. Each editor decides, per scene, whether to generate proxies on their machine for offline cutting or to stream the original for review. The director can pull a cut on a MacBook in a hotel room and the colorist can grade the same project on a calibrated reference monitor without ever moving a hard drive. The Smart Relink at finishing reads the timeline and pulls only the clips you actually used, in full resolution, straight from R2.

Recommended plan

Documentary teams usually need the Studio plan for the three-user collaboration cap and ten terabytes of cloud storage. A two-year documentary with two cameras typically lands around six to eight terabytes of unique footage after deduplication, which fits inside Studio with room for working files. Enterprise becomes relevant when the team grows beyond three editors or when archives push past ten terabytes.

Recommended workflows

RED RAW (R3D) editing workflow in DaVinci Resolve

RED Komodo, V-Raptor and V-Raptor XL produce R3D files at 300 to 700 GB per hour in 6K and 8K. DaVinci Resolve handles R3D natively, but the bandwidth still bottlenecks at the disk. Sanbila keeps the originals in cloud storage and lets Resolve open lightweight proxies during the offline cut, then switches each clip back to the original through a WebDAV mount when the colorist needs the raw debayer.

Sanbila by the numbers

Real specs from the live Sanbila product, not marketing claims.

NLEs supported (Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Avid)

Proxy presets — from 540p H.264 to 1080p DNxHR LB

File formats supported (MP4, MOV, MXF, R3D, BRAW, WAV…)

85%

Average disk savings vs editing on 4K originals

Egress fees on Cloudflare R2 — stream originals at zero cost

Parallel R2 connections on macOS (4 on Windows / Linux), 4 MB block cache

Documentary editor questions

Can I import existing RAID drives from previous shoots into Sanbila?

Yes. Plug the RAID into the machine, point Sanbila at the folder, and every file is hashed and uploaded with deduplication. Folder structures are preserved, and the originals stay on R2 with a Backblaze B2 backup.

How do I keep timecode and sound sync from production?

Sanbila uploads the camera files and the production sound files as you delivered them on set. Timecode metadata embedded in the MOV / MXF stays intact. Sound sync in Resolve, Premiere or Avid runs the same way it would on a local mount.

What if my freelance editor lives in a country with slow internet?

They generate proxies once on their machine and keep editing offline for the entire scene. The proxy lives on their SSD and survives without an internet connection. Sync happens when they push the project back to Sanbila.