Benjamin Carter

A rickshaw dolly is a low-profile push-cart platform with a seat for the camera operator, used in filmmaking to follow moving subjects (runners, cyclists, vehicles) while the operator rides or walks alongside, allowing smooth handheld-style tracking shots without rails. The best rickshaw and push dollies for filmmakers let solo crews and small teams capture long, … Read more

Our team spent eight weeks testing ten of the best external SSDs for filmmakers on location across real documentary shoots, commercial production days, and travel-heavy documentary work. We offloaded CFexpress and SD cards on desert ridges, in monsoon rain, and inside cramped hotel rooms, then cut 4K ProRes and 6K BRAW timelines directly off each … Read more

When you’re hauling a camera bag through rain, dust, or a Saharan-grade sandstorm, the difference between a standard portable SSD and a proper rugged SSD is the difference between finishing the day and losing the day. We spent the last two months running eight rugged SSDs through real field scenarios — from a damp dock … Read more

If you edit video for a living, your storage is your edit bay. I learned this the hard way on a client project last winter when my “fast enough” portable SSD choked on a multicam 6K timeline, dropped frames in Premiere, and forced a re-encode at 11 p.m. the night before delivery. That panic bought … Read more

I have lost count of how many wedding shoots, documentary days, and on-location commercial jobs started with a filmmaker staring at a card reader that refused to mount a freshly dumped CFexpress card. After three months of testing readers across Sony FX3, Canon R5 C, Blackmagic Pyxis 6K, and RED Komodo workflows, our team ranked … Read more

If you shoot on a RED V-Raptor, a Sony FX3, a Canon C70, or a Blackmagic URSA, your CFexpress cards are doing the heavy lifting. On a recent short film I shot in 6K BRAW, a single 512GB card held about 90 minutes of footage, and offloading it through the camera body would have eaten … Read more

I learned the hard way that a single drive failure can erase an entire short film. Three years ago I lost the raw footage for a 14-minute documentary because I trusted one external hard drive. That mistake is exactly why I built the guide you’re reading now. If you’re searching for the best backup drives … Read more

If you have ever lost a finished cut to a failed drive, you never forget the feeling. I learned that lesson the hard way on a short documentary in 2019, when a spinning disk click-of-death wiped a year’s worth of BRAW footage two days before delivery. That is when I built my first LTO tape … Read more

I built my first home editing suite in 2014 with a single 4TB external drive, and I lost a documentary project to a drive failure exactly two months later. That is the day I started recommending RAID enclosures to every editor I meet, and it is the reason our team spent the last six months … Read more

I have lost footage exactly once in my career. A drive failed on a documentary shoot, the recovery quote came back higher than the film’s remaining budget, and the edit was salvaged only because an assistant had copied dailies to a second drive the night before. That day, I started taking backup seriously. Years later, … Read more