How I Use a $5.5 WebDAV Mount to Edit 4K Video Without Local Storage

Editing 4K ProRes or 8K RAW video on a laptop with a 1 TB SSD can be taxing, requiring cache clearing, footage offloading, and drive swapping. To avoid these inconveniences, the author tried a unique solution for three months. The setup involves a home server running a WebDAV endpoint on a 10 Gbps NIC, paired with a second-hand ATOM nhk Lake computer (around $400 on eBay) with 64 GB RAM. The 4K ProRes source files reside on the server, accessible through a WebDAV share.

The share is mounted as a drive letter (W:) on Windows 11 using a WebDAV client called ScsDriver. DaVinci Resolve treats W: like any other local path, allowing optimized media cache, audio waveforms, and timeline proxies to function seamlessly without pre-generation. This setup proved effective, with the author experiencing no dropped sessions or corrupted project files over three months. Reconnection was sub-second on a standard home network.

However, multi-user editing was not feasible with a single WebDAV share due to potential conflicts and per-file locking. For collaborative workflows, the author recommends using a proper SAN or a cloud workstation service. The checklist includes running the server on wired gigabit, keeping the WebDAV client connections alive, generating optimized media to a local scratch disk, saving the project file locally, and making backups of the project file.

The author suggests that if you already possess a home server, the only additional expense is the WebDAV client, costing around $5.5 for a lifetime license. This is significantly cheaper than alternative solutions like ThunderBolt RAID enclosures or 4 TB external SSDs. If you lack a server, renting a small VPS with 200 GB of NVMe for $5 a month allows you to set up a similar WebDAV mount.

Keeping project files and optimized media cache local is crucial, treating the WebDAV share as an external scratch disk that offers speed and capacity.