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Comment by Valgrim | Hacker News Reader

Simple question here: Video files are HUGE. An iPad, even with a fairly large storage for a tablet, would be quickly swamped by the files, and to transfer the RAW video files to and from the device would make it quite frustrating.

Is there a way to connect an external drive on an iPad?

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Presumably, you could edit using proxies on your iPad and only have those actually synced to the iPad itself for space saving. It's not 1:1 to your source footage, but depending on how you encoded the proxy it certainly would be good enough for cutting footage on the go and you could sync the project back to your computer to continue working.

Yeah proxies would be the way to go with this - that or short form content. You could easily have a bunch of high quality videos on an iPad to edit a single 2 or 3 minute video which may be their target audience here. Once you are done send those high quality source files up to a cloud storage and delete them locally.

Personally I am still waiting for someone to really get the proxy workflow right - it still requires too much manual control and planning. Someone needs to create a very robust asset management plane that does a better job of autolinking files when they are accidentality unlinked (could be easily done with a simple AI analyzing video content of different files along with an audio analyzer).

> Personally I am still waiting for someone to really get the proxy workflow right - it still requires too much manual control and planning. Someone needs to create a very robust asset management plane that does a better job of autolinking files when they are accidentality unlinked (could be easily done with a simple AI analyzing video content of different files along with an audio analyzer).

I'm hoping that the iPad app will push BM to be the ones to do this. Given that the concept of a filesystem on an iPad is very different (yeah, the Files app exists but it's terribly buggy if you are using network shares and stuff) and the need for auto-linking goes up quite a bit.

If their MVP iPad app evolves into something that "just works" across devices, then I think they will have a really good value proposition in a field where short-form or fast produced social media content can be done on the go.

All usb-c iPads support external drives and the old lightning ones have limited support with an adapter

Sounds like it from their description ("USB-C media disks"):

Supported file formats include H.264, H.265, Apple ProRes and Blackmagic RAW, with clips able to be imported from the iPad Pro internal storage and Photos library, or externally connected iCloud and USB-C media disks.

Lumafusion (the incumbent product in this space) can edit directly on an external drive without copying the information to the ipad itself.

I use a 4tb samsung ssd and on usb-c , it's pretty much as fast as you need it to go, and if you need more space, you can get 8TB ssd's - it's more expensive, but it's easy enough to get.

On my M1 Air I use a 500gb USB C San Disk drive as my scratch. You can get much higher drives and connect it over USB C.

USB-C ipads seem to support 10gbps speeds.

You can hook up a 10gbps Ethernet adapter[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HesEVXItRu0

It's thunderbolt, so 40gbps

Note that not all usb-c iPads are thunderbolt, only the 2(?) most recent iPad Pro models.

Yup, the drive shows up in the Files app when mounted.

The iPad Pro has faster storage than most people’s computers, and the same i/o as the Macbook Air (USB3/Thunderbolt).

It would not be swamped, no.

iPadOS doesn’t support RAW video formats (just h264, h265 and ProRes) but yes you can edit directly off usb-c SSD, it’s plenty fast.

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