Tutorial: Backing Up Your Footage With Red Giant Offload

Welcome to this quick tutorial on using the Red Giant Offload application. For those of you unfamiliar with Red Giant Products, they offer a bundle of some amazing plug-in software that work with NLEs like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut X.

In this tutorial, I’m going to give you a brief overview of their Offload application, which offers a simple and reliable way to transfer your footage. This is primarily targeted at videographers and crews that are transferring footage in the field, but it can be used on any production. The software costs $99 US at the time of this article. Red Giant does offer free trials, which is a great way to test and see if this is a good fit for your workflow.

What Offload Does

Data ingesting, file management, footage transferring, or whatever you want to call it is one of the most valuable assets on any shoot. It's never a bad idea to have a crew member dedicated to solely handling getting the footage from your media to a computer or a hard drive.

One of my favorite features of Offload is that it can easily make an additional copy of your files to another destination or drive. Let me show you how.

How Offload Works

I’m back from a recent shoot and I’ve got my media connected to my computer. Once you have Offload open, you'll see the program has a very simple layout (Figure 1, below). Starting with the left panel, Source displays what media card or format the program is pooling from.

Figure 1. The Offload layout

Usually, if you have your media connected, then Offload will automatically recognize that, otherwise you can click in the Source panel pull-down shown in Figure 2 (below) to select your source.

Figure 2. The Source panel