Case X for editors: 4K multicam without the proxy round-trip

The honest truth about content creation in 2026: storage went up faster than camera resolution did.

A Sony FX3 recording 4K 60p in S-Log3 generates roughly 800 megabytes per minute. A wedding shooter running three cameras for an 8-hour day comes home with 1.1 terabytes of raw footage. That's before proxies, before stems, before color-graded exports.

A TikTok creator filming a ten-minute talking-head in ProRes 422 HQ on an iPhone 16 Pro hits 80 gigabytes per session. A YouTuber doing a tutorial cut in DaVinci Resolve with two camera angles, a screen recording, and B-roll is at 200 GB before they cut a single frame.

The MacBook Pro on their desk shipped with 1 TB. Two shoots and it's full.

The phrase "I'll just delete some old projects" is the line every editor crosses about four times a year. It's the sound of a workflow held together with duct tape.

Why "just use an external SSD" doesn't survive a 4K timeline

Editors get told to "just use an external SSD" the same way producers do, and the failure mode is the same: a bus-powered USB-C drive that sustains 1,000 MB/s for 30 seconds, then drops to 200 MB/s under thermal throttle, then drops your timeline playback to 12 fps.

Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve all do the same thing when the drive can't keep up: they switch to proxy playback or drop frames. Either way you're now editing in a degraded preview and you can't trust what you see on the monitor.

The fix is the same one we shipped for producers and law firms — a chassis designed to sustain peak throughput, not benchmark it. Case X holds 3,500 MB/s sequential reads through a 90-minute 4K multicam playback because the entire aluminum body acts as the heatsink. We've tested it in Resolve with four streams of 4K ProRes 422 HQ + a Neat Video noise reduction pass on the foreground stream. It doesn't drop frames. The competition does.

The ingest workflow that doesn't take an hour

Every editor we've talked to has the same complaint about ingest day. SD cards copy in slow. The first pass through Hedge or Shotput Pro takes two hours for a single shoot day's footage. The second pass — making proxies, generating thumbnails, building the Premiere project file — takes another two.

The reason ingest is slow isn't the card reader. It's the destination. A CFexpress Type B card reads at 1,700 MB/s sustained. If your destination drive only writes at 400, you're bottlenecked four-to-one on the slow end.

Plug a CFexpress reader into a Mac Studio M2 Ultra and have it copy to Case X over USB4. Both sides of the transfer sustain north of 1,500 MB/s. An 8-hour wedding shoot lands on the edit drive in 14 minutes. That's not a microbenchmark. That's a real ingest with checksum verification on.

Multicam without the proxy round-trip

The hidden cost of editing in proxies isn't the proxies themselves — it's the round-trip. Proxy. Edit. Switch back to full-res to color. Re-render to check. Switch back to proxy. Export. Wait. Re-link. Wait again.

A drive fast enough to play four streams of 4K ProRes simultaneously deletes that whole cycle. You edit in full resolution from the first cut. Color happens on the same timeline you cut on. There's no "let me switch off proxies and re-link" panic on export day.

Case X at 4 TB holds:

• Roughly 30 wedding-shoot days at FX3 4K 60p
• Roughly 120 TikTok shoots at iPhone ProRes 422 HQ
• Roughly 8 feature-length documentary cuts at 4K ProRes 422 + color stems
• Or a single Octocam production day at 4K 30p across all eight angles

For most working editors, that's three months of active projects on a single drive that lives on the desk and never gets unplugged.

What about RAID?

We get this question a lot. The honest answer: RAID is great for studios with a network. It's overkill for a one-person editing shop and a nightmare on the road.

A 4-bay desktop RAID costs $1,200 empty and another $1,500 to populate with 4 TB drives. It needs wall power. It hums. It rebuilds for 18 hours when one drive fails. You can't take it to a coffee shop.

Case X is a single drive. If you need redundancy, buy two — one to work on, one to mirror to via Carbon Copy Cloner at end of day. Total cost: less than the empty RAID enclosure. Total speed: same as the RAID. Total portability: throw both in a backpack.

The right backup strategy for an editor isn't RAID. It's two identical drives, one of which lives in a different room than the other one at the end of every shoot day.

What we'd actually buy

Solo creator / TikTok / YouTube channel: Case X 2 TB lives on the desk, plugged into the laptop. All current projects on it. The laptop's internal SSD is empty except for the OS and Premiere/FCP. Buy a second 2 TB once a quarter for archive.

Wedding / event videographer: Case X 4 TB lives in the camera bag. Cards ingest to it on location, in the back of the venue, between the ceremony and the reception. Then a second Case X at home gets a Carbon Copy mirror that night. The originals live on cards until the second mirror confirms.

Small commercial studio / agency: Three or four Case X 4 TBs, one per active project. When a project wraps, the drive goes in the project drawer with a label. The client gets a copy on a fifth Case X they keep. The studio computer never has more than the current month's project on its internal SSD.

The pattern is the same shape regardless of which kind of editor you are: one drive per active context, two copies of anything you can't re-shoot, the laptop's internal SSD stays mostly empty. Storage stops being the thing you think about. The work gets faster because you stopped wrestling with the disk.

That's the whole pitch. Stop wrestling with the disk.