LocoBaseStills tell a director what a place looks like. Video tells them what it is like to be in it. Sightlines, ceiling height, how the light moves through a room across a walk, how loud the road is, how far the front door really is from where the trucks would park.
Every location can hold video alongside its photos. It travels with the location into projects and into anything you share, exactly as the photos do.
Uploading
- Open a location and click Edit
- In the Photos and video strip, click Upload videos
- Drop the file on the panel that opens, or click to browse
The upload runs in the background with a real progress bar. You can cancel it at any point without losing the location or anything else on it.
On a location you are creating for the first time there is nothing to attach a file to yet, so the video waits in the strip and uploads the moment you save.
Where it appears
Video sits in the gallery with the stills, as a thumbnail with a play mark on it. There is no separate video section to go looking for: the photos and the walkthrough are the same set, in one place, because they answer the same question about a place.
On the collage at the top of a location, the overlay counts what is behind it by kind (so many photos, so many clips), and opening any frame drops you into the gallery, where video plays in place.
MP4, MOV, WebM, and M4V are accepted, which covers every phone and every camera anyone is likely to hand you. The per-file ceiling is 2 GB.
Compression, and why it is on by default
Anything over 40 MB is re-encoded on your own phone or laptop before it uploads, using the device's video chip. It is decided per file and needs nothing from you.
This matters more than it sounds like it should:
- A minute of iPhone 4K is roughly 350 MB. The same minute after compression is roughly 30 MB. Your plan therefore holds about ten times more footage.
- On a weak signal on location, that is the difference between an upload that finishes and one you give up on. A 9 minute upload becomes about 50 seconds.
The app measures your actual upload speed before deciding, rather than guessing from the signal bars. A phone pulling 40 Mbps down can easily be pushing only 2 Mbps up, and it is the upload speed that decides whether you are standing in a field waiting.
Compression targets 1080p, which is the right size for judging a space on a laptop or a phone. Footage you need untouched for a VFX or tech reference is better kept wherever you keep your camera originals. This is a scouting record, not an archive.
Footage that is already compressed is left alone. If you upload something exported from an edit, the app recognises it has nothing to gain and uploads it as it is, rather than putting it through a second generation of quality loss.
What each plan holds
Video is quoted in hours rather than gigabytes, because hours is what you are actually storing.
Free: about 1 hour.
Indie: about 14 hours.
Pro: about 57 hours.
These are approximate on purpose. A static interior fits more hours than a handheld walk-and-talk, because a moving camera needs more data to stay sharp. Treat the figures as a good guide rather than a stopwatch.
Your current usage is in Settings, under Plan and Billing.
How storage differs from image reads
Image reads are a monthly allowance that refills. Video storage is a standing total that does not.
That means it works the way a hard drive works rather than the way a phone plan works. Nothing resets at the start of the month, and nothing is used up by watching. Delete a clip and the space comes straight back.
Running out
Filling your video storage pauses new video uploads and nothing else. Locations, photos, projects, scout days, sharing, and AI tagging all keep working exactly as before.
To free space, delete footage you no longer need, or move up a plan.
If you downgrade while holding more video than the new plan allows, everything you have already uploaded stays where it is and stays playable. Only new uploads wait until you are back under the line. We are not going to delete footage somebody shot because a card expired.
Who can see it
The same people who can see the location. A viewer on a shared project can watch the walkthrough; only someone with editing rights can add or remove video.
Video is never stored at a public address. Every play goes through a short-lived private link, so a URL copied out of a browser is useless to anyone by the time it is pasted somewhere else. Revoking a share revokes the video with it.
What to shoot
The walkthroughs that earn their place tend to look the same:
- Start outside at the approach, so the viewer arrives the way the crew would
- Walk the route a scene would actually take, at a normal walking pace rather than a sweep
- Hold on the awkward things for a second longer than feels natural: the low beam, the pillar in the middle of the room, the window facing the wrong way
- Say what you are looking at out loud. The audio is worth more than the pictures on a second viewing
- Two or three minutes beats twenty. Nobody watches twenty
Keep the photos too. A director scrubs a video once and comes back to the stills a dozen times, so both are doing a job. See Managing Location Photos.