How to send 4K and RAW video to a client

At this size the transfer limit stops being the problem and the connection becomes the problem. A 200 GB ProRes delivery takes hours to upload and something will interrupt it, so the property that decides whether you can send it at all is whether an interrupted upload resumes or restarts. Almost no comparison table mentions it.

Know the number first

4K is not one size. The same one-minute clip varies by more than a factor of thirty depending on how it was recorded:

So a ten-minute ProRes 422 HQ cut is around 50 GB, and an hour of camera RAW is comfortably into the hundreds. The fuller version of this table is worth a look before you plan a delivery.

The one property that matters: resumable uploads

A 200 GB upload on a decent domestic connection is a several-hour job. In that window your laptop will sleep, a router will restart, or the connection will drop. If the service starts from zero each time, the file is effectively unsendable regardless of its advertised ceiling.

Test this before you trust a service with real work. Start a large upload, disconnect your network deliberately, reconnect, and watch what happens. Either it picks up near where it left off or it does not. Five minutes of testing prevents a lost night.

Services built for this hold partial uploads and continue from the last committed chunk rather than the last byte, so you may lose a little progress but not all of it. Why that is harder than it sounds if you want the technical version.

Never re-encode the master

If a size limit is pushing you toward exporting the deliverable at a lower bitrate, stop. You are damaging the thing you are being paid for to avoid using a different service, and the loss is permanent and cumulative.

Send a compressed review copy instead, get the notes, then send the master once. A viewing-quality 1080p H.264 export of a ten-minute cut is under a gigabyte, uploads in minutes and is entirely adequate for someone to say the grade is too warm. How to make a video file smaller covers doing that well.

This habit saves more time than any product decision on this page.

Where to send it

From each company's own documentation, on the dates stated:

• Filemail Pro sends up to 250 GB per transfer with 1 TB of storage and lists file availability as permanent; Business lists transfer size as "Any Size" (1 August 2026). The category specialist for exactly this.
• Smash Pro sends and receives up to 250 GB with expiry up to 30 days; Team up to 1 TB. The free tier queues anything over 2 GB rather than refusing it, which makes a slow free transfer genuinely possible (1 August 2026).
• SwissTransfer takes 50 GB free with no account, deleted after 15 days (1 August 2026). Excellent for a single master. Note that archives over 10 GB have to be downloaded one file at a time, which is awkward for a delivery folder.
• Yungle, mine: free transfers are 10 GB each and unlimited in number, with resumable uploads as the default and folder structure preserved. Paid plans are bounded by storage quota rather than a per-transfer ceiling, and nothing expires.

The video editor comparison goes into which suits repeat client delivery.

Practical workflow

Deliver a folder, not a pile of files. A finished job is the graded master, the web export, the stems, the subtitles and some stills. Sent loose, they arrive in whatever order they finished uploading and the client emails you asking which is which. Check that your service preserves folder structure rather than flattening it.

Include a text file saying what everything is. Two minutes, and it prevents a week of email.

Upload overnight, wired, with sleep disabled. Obvious, routinely forgotten, and the cause of most failed overnight uploads is a laptop lid rather than a network.

Do not upload from the machine you need to take somewhere.

Check the hash if it matters. For a master going to a facility, comparing a checksum on both ends is the only way to know the file arrived intact. Most people skip it and mostly get away with it.

When to post a drive instead

There is a size where physical media simply wins. Uploading 10 TB on a typical connection takes weeks; a courier takes a day.

Encrypt the drive, send the passphrase through a different channel than the drive itself, and use a tracked service. This is standard practice in film work and it is not a defeat.

The rough threshold is somewhere above a terabyte, depending on your upload speed. Work it out honestly: take the size, divide by your real upload rate rather than the advertised one, and if the answer is more than about two days, post it.