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

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

Most video editors assume your media lives on a fast local drive. If you are editing 4K ProRes or 8K RAW on a laptop with a 1 TB SSD, you know the pain: clearing cache, offloading footage, swapping drives. I tried something different for the last three months and it actually worked.

The setup

• A home server running a WebDAV endpoint on a 10 Gbps NIC
• A second-hand ATOM nhk Lake (about $400 on eBay) with 64 GB RAM
• The 4K ProRes source files live on the server, behind a WebDAV share
• I mount the share on Windows 11 as a drive letter (W:) using a WebDAV client
• DaVinci Resolve treats W: like any other local path

What worked

DaVinci Resolve 19 is the first NLE that actually behaves with remote storage on Windows. As long as the file is on a stable mounted drive and the OS reports it as a fixed disk (not a removable one), Resolve's optimized media cache, audio waveforms, and timeline proxies all work without you having to pre-generate them.

The mount client I use is ScsDriver, a Windows tool that speaks WebDAV and exposes the share as a normal drive letter with caching and reconnect. It costs $1.5 monthly or $5.5 for a lifetime license (it was $9.99 before, the lifetime price is now down to $5.5 as a limited-time deal on the website). I tested the alternatives first.

• RaiDrive free tier drops to 50 GB after the first year and shows ads in the tray
• Cyberduck is donationware but does not auto-reconnect on resume from sleep
• Windows built-in net use w: works but locks up if the connection drops mid-write

ScsDriver with the $5.5 lifetime was the only one I could just install and forget about. Three months in, I have not had a single dropped session that corrupted a project file. Reconnect is sub-second on a normal home network.

What did not work

Editing 8K RAW over WebDAV is still a stretch. The throughput is there (gigabit wired, 110 MB/s sustained), but Resolve generates proxies in a burst, and the round-trip latency on random reads was enough to push render times to 3-4x local. For 4K ProRes, ProRes 422 HQ, and H.265 it is invisible.

Multi-user editing is not really a thing on a single WebDAV share. Two editors hitting the same .drp file at once will eventually conflict. Locking is per-file and not per-byte-range. If you need a real collaborative workflow, use a proper SAN or a cloud workstation service. WebDAV is great for one editor, one drive.

The checklist I followed

1. Run your server on wired gigabit at minimum. Wi-Fi 6 is fine for proxy workflows, but not for 4K.
2. Set the WebDAV client to keep connections alive and retry on transient errors.
3. Generate optimized media to a local scratch disk, not back to the share. Resolve lets you point the cache at any path.
4. Save the project file locally, not on the share. The share is for source media only.
5. Make backups of the project file separately. A WebDAV share is a good mount point, not a backup target.

Should you try this?

If you already have a home server, the only real cost is the WebDAV client. I have about $400 in the Atom machine and $5.5 in the ScsDriver lifetime. Compare that to a ThunderBolt RAID enclosure or a 4 TB external SSD and the math is not even close.

If you do not have a server, you can rent a small VPS with 200 GB of NVMe for $5 a month, run a WebDAV daemon on it, and use the same setup. The latency will be higher but the workflow is the same.

The most important thing is to keep your project files and your optimized media cache local. Treat the WebDAV share like an external scratch disk that happens to be very fast and very large. Once you start doing that, you stop noticing it is remote.