I recently picked up a Gnarbox to try out for my travel kit.

Don’t know what a Gnarbox is? Well it’s a portable storage device to offload cards while in the field or traveling. I’m using it as a backup device to my Hoodman Steel SD cards.

It also allows you to edit video clips using your smartphone. It is a simplistic editor, but allows you to put together a quick video on the fly and then post it on your website, blog, etc.

I haven’t done much video editing with it but decided to put a couple of clips together shot by my students for my intro video class on our Sony Rx10 III. I pulled the card out of the camera and inserted it into the Gnarbox. It began the upload process and soon enough, there were the three clips they had shot. I was able to trim them and put them into a timeline and then use a simple music base that came with the Gnarbox.

Pretty slick little storage box. Over the years, I’ve had numerous portable storage boxes, but this is the first I’ve had that can edit video in the field. That may be a real help when you’re traveling and don’t have a laptop available, but need to get some video stories posted.

The only downside I see to it is that it needs a larger internal hard drive than the 128GB it comes with. Gnarbox says that you can attach external hard drives for more storage, but I believe it needs more internal with the amount of images and video shot today. Especially if I’m using it in tough element situations.

I’ll be playing more with the Gnarbox over the next couple of weeks and be reporting back on the results. From my first couple of encounters with it, it looks like a nice tool to add to my camera bag.