The Gnarbox (pronounces narbox) comes with an impressive promise. It will provide editing, backup, and preview for your videos (and stills) with no laptop while you are on the go.
We chatted with Will Africano, COO and co-founder of the Gnar box at Photo Plus Expo and got a glimpse of the device. If the Gnarbox will live up to the hype they created, this box is probably going to be in everyone’s kit.
The idea is this: why carry a laptop on location when you can use a small and rigid box, coupled with a smartphone or tablet to perform all your photo and video needs on the go.
Gnarbox supports, card offloading, backing up data, raw preview and edit, simple video editing and rendering and a few more features designed to completely replace a laptop while on location. It works by creating a hot spot and giving you access to your cards (via sd slots), portable hard drives (via USB ports) and an internal disk.
This makes offloading your cards to three different locations a breeze. Gnar claims to support full USB3, so 4 gigs a minute, which should allow a non-interrupted shooting with card swapping. The in-box storage is 256GB, and you can extend it with external drives.
One of the more interesting features is that the gnarbox supports both video and stills editing. After downloading the files into the Gnarbox, you can open a timeline and make basic edits and cuts, and well as export a clip. Gnarbox claims smooth 4K, which is pretty sweet.
You can look at a short video of the workflow here:
The Gnarbox is already available on B&H and Amazon, it’s $299 for 128GB unit and $399 for a 256GB unit. We will have a full review coming soon
I recently got a device called RAVPower FileHub Plus, which looks extremely similar to me in what it does, but is only around $40.
For the most part, it works great and I’m using it quite often. The WiFi extender feature is amazing. You can also use it as a portable mini NAS on a train in a team for collaboration. And it doubles as a USB power bank.
The biggest issue for me is that their iOS app is slightly clunky and does not integrate into the iOS 11 Files app (yet?). Also, raw image preview using their app is too slow to be practical as it seems to try to generate thumbnails from the full raw files instead of using the embedded preview thumbnail, making it more useful for copying files than looking through images.
Image preview from a Laptop (you can easily connect via SMB like you would to any other NAS if you enter the WiFi hotspot created by the device) using Finder is instant, so it does not seem to be an issue with the transfer speed, but just with their app.
Another issue is that it currently doesn’t support drives formatted in HFS+.
Hello is it possible to use it for editing
videos longer than 30 minutes?
Very informative and useful demo. Looks like an essential piece for a travel journalist like me… Now I just have to test one in the field. Thanks!