How to send a 50 GB video to a client
and let them watch it, not just wait for it.

The transfer route is honest about what it is. It is a courier. The bytes arrive intact, the recipient gets a download, and the service is finished. That is a good product when the delivery is a single event, and it should not be talked down.

It has three costs that only show up at this size. The link expires, because expiry is how a courier reclaims its shelf, so the client who comes back for the master in four months finds a dead page. There is no player, so nothing about the film is visible from the link itself. And the download is blind: your client has to commit to pulling 50 GB, in full, before they can see whether the third act works or whether the grade shifted. If the answer is a note rather than an archive, you have made them buy an hour of bandwidth to give it.

The hosting route inverts that. The file sits at a permanent address, the client opens a page and presses play, and the original is a button on the same page when they want to keep it. The cost of that route is a storage bill you carry between jobs, and a per-file ceiling. Both are real, and both are below.

Two conclusions fall out of it. The first is that 50 GB is a lot of delivery export and not much finishing master. A 10 Mbps web file would have to run eleven hours to reach it; a 400 Mbps finishing master reaches it in seventeen minutes. Size alone does not tell you the codec or whether the file can play on your client’s device.

The second is that the bottom half of that table is where storage plans in this industry start to bite. A feature-length finishing master is not a 50 GB problem. It is a several-hundred-gigabyte problem, and the honest answer for it is at the end of this page.

Frame.io deserves the middle column and deserves to be taken seriously in it. It accepts assets up to 5 TB. It preserves the file you uploaded and offers it for download, alongside a smaller proxy, so nothing is destroyed by the encode. And it is the better review product: Shares exist to send media out for review, with viewer permissions that gate commenting and downloading, and an expiration date when a link should not outlive the round. If review workflow is the centre of the job, that is where the job belongs.

The difference worth understanding is what the client watches. Frame.io encodes a separate HTML5 version for web playback and keeps the original beside it. We do not make a second version at all. There is no transcode at upload, no transcode at playback and no rendition ladder, so what streams is the object you uploaded. The honest consequence of that is a real trade against us: with no lower rendition to fall back on, a thin connection buffers rather than quietly switching your client to a softer version of the film.

Check the actual export before sending it. A long browser-compatible video can be 50 GB; a short finishing master can be much larger. File size does not decide playback support. Use the upload compatibility check, then verify playback on the device your client uses.

If the original is unsuitable for browser review or needs more bandwidth than your client has, add a compatible H.264, HEVC or AV1 review copy. Keep the original available for download when the handoff requires it. Each copy counts toward your storage allowance.

Direct playback preserves the uploaded file. Smooth playback also requires a supported codec and enough connection capacity; a lighter review copy can help when either is a barrier.

The claim we will not make is the one you have read elsewhere. An upload here does not survive a closed laptop. If the lid goes down mid-transfer, the transfer stops, and finishing it means re-dropping the same file so the completed parts can be recognised. Every other tool that promises otherwise is either running a desktop application or quietly restarting.

One related note if the master is destined for the archive rather than the shelf. Cold storage is included on every paid plan, and the web dashboard moves masters up to 20 GB into it; anything larger goes through the macOS app, which moves the file part by part. A cold master does not stream, embed or appear in a review, so retire a delivery to cold once the client has what they need, not before.

The first is size. Above 5 TB in a single file, our uploader refuses it in the browser and the conversation is over. A camera-original haul or a card dump going to a post house can arrive as one object past that line, and no plan we sell takes it. A per-gigabyte courier is built precisely for that job.

The second is shape. If the file goes out once, to one person, who will ingest it into their own storage and never open it in a browser, then everything a host provides is overhead. Nothing in that job needs a player, a comment, a password page or a permanent address. It needs the bytes moved once and then forgotten, and paying for that single trip is cheaper than carrying a subscription between jobs.

The logic runs the other way just as hard, which is the whole reason this page exists. Deliveries that repeat, that get watched, that collect notes, that have to be re-sent to a second stakeholder in November, are exactly what a per-delivery meter punishes and a storage meter ignores. The same master pulled by five people twice each is ten billable deliveries on one model and one stored file on the other. If you want that arithmetic done properly, with real published rates, the MASV break-even page works it out plan by plan.

Upload the original, check playback and add a compatible review copy if your client needs one. Enable original downloads when they need the source file. Pick a plan with room: Pro holds 250 GB hot, Max 500 GB and Studio 1 TB, and the free Starter plan’s 5 GB is not in this conversation. Expect the upload to want an uninterrupted tab, not an uninterrupted week. And when the job is genuinely one trip for one recipient who will never look at it in a browser, use a courier and spend the difference on the grade.

The rest of the handoff, including what belongs in a complete delivery package, is covered in delivering final video files to clients, and the quality argument behind all of it is in sending large video files without losing quality. Plan prices and storage caps are set out in full on the pricing page.