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iPad Frustrations I

Over the weekend I played in a tennis tournament and used a GoPro to record the final match. I decided to edit the footage on my 12″ iPad Pro.

Importing the footage from the GoPro was trivial using Apple’s Lightning SD Card Reader. iMovie on the iPad worked very well.

Problems started when it came time to share the finished movie with the other players. The result was over an hour and a half long, and weighed in at over 10GB when saved out as a 1080p movie. This is too large for my DropBox account and my iCloud account. What to do?

First idea: save it back to an SD card. Turns out you cannot do this.

Next idea: try and Air Drop the file to my Mac. Seemed to work but the resulting file was only a few hundred MB and would not open – sigh.

Next idea: save it to a USB memory stick. Can’t do this either even though I do have a lightning USB adapter.

In the end, I had to FTP the file (using Panic’s Transmit) from the iPad to my Mac. From there I could copy the file to a USB memory stick. Side note: When sharing a massive file like this, the iPad should not go to sleep in the middle and abort the share operation – it sucked having to baby sit the thing to keep it from going to sleep.

There is so much about the iPad that I really like. I take it with me almost everywhere. I pretty much live in Linea, OmniOutliner, Tweetbot, Slack, Mail and Safari. But when I try and do seemingly simple things with it I run aground, over and over again. iOS 11 is a huge improvement but it does not address this kind of issue.

2 Comments

  1. Did you try using iTunes’ document sharing or iMazing’s file Browser to get the file off your Mac? Also, hopefully sharing the document to Transmit will get faster when iOS 11 (hopefully) uses APFS smart cloning to create a copy for Transmit.

  2. No. I was initially trying to solve the problem without using the Mac – I wanted to find an iOS->NAS solution. My long term goal is to leave my Mac behind and be able to work entirely on the iPad. The iTunes approach with a wired connection may have been faster. I doubt APFS will make any difference since offloading data to a NAS involves some sort of network transmission.

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