Alex The Tennis Pro: 100GB+ Sony files and 4K delivery

Alex The Tennis Pro shoots on Sony cinema bodies and delivers in 4K. Individual projects arrived as 100GB or more of source footage.

Two long-form videos over about two months. This one is a case study about infrastructure rather than storytelling, because at that file size infrastructure is what determines whether the project is possible.

Large-format footage changes the job

Most creator footage is manageable. You pull it in, cut it, export it, and the technical layer never really asserts itself.

At 100GB+ per project in 4K, everything that was previously invisible becomes the constraint. Transfer time is measured in hours. Scrubbing raw footage on a timeline is not viable. A single careless export can cost most of a day, and doing that twice destroys a deadline that looked comfortable.

None of this is glamorous and all of it is the difference between delivering and apologising.

How I handled it

Proxy workflow, without exception

Everything gets cut on proxies and relinked to the originals for the final export. This is standard practice and it is standard because the alternative is an editor fighting playback instead of making decisions.

The discipline is doing it every time, including on the project that feels small enough to skip it. Those are the ones that go wrong.

Protect the resolution you were given

If a client is shooting on that kind of body, the image quality is the product. It is remarkably easy to quietly destroy it: a wrong export preset, an unnecessary intermediate render, a colour pipeline that clips the highlights the camera was bought to capture.

Preserving what the camera actually recorded, all the way through to the delivered file, is a specific responsibility on a project like this and it does not happen by default.

Coaching content has a functional job

This is instructional content. Someone is watching to learn a drill, and that changes what a good cut is.

Cutting away from a demonstration too early, or trimming the repetition that makes a technique legible, produces a tighter video that fails at the only thing it was made for. Pacing serves comprehension here, not retention for its own sake.

Result

Two 4K long-form coaching videos over about two months, delivered at the quality the camera package was bought to produce.

The visuals look good man, will send over the footage for the next video.

Alex The Tennis Pro

Related sports work on a pickleball channel. If you are shooting large-format and the post pipeline is the bottleneck, book a call.