Ways to communicate with a Chinese crew and to get footage from China

Many websites or applications which are popular in Western countries don’t work in China, such as Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp. We need to use VPN to have access to these websites and applications, but VPN is not stable. To make sure that a shoot goes well, it’s important to know how to communicate with a local Chinese crew and how to get footage from China without having to use VPN.

For pre-shooting meetings, we recommend Team and Zoom, which are not ( yet ) blocked by the Chinese government. WeChat is the most popular way to chat remotely in China? You can do video chat/audio chat/ group chat with it. However, if you don’t have a WeChat account and want to register one from abroad, we don’t recommend it. It’s becoming complicated to get an account and you have to ask several people to scan a QR code for you in a very short period of time. Facetime is surprisingly super convenient. You can use it to make a quick call before the shoot, keep in contact with the crew during the shoot, or conduct the interview by yourself.

• Team

• Zoom

• WeChat

• Facetime

• WhatsApp

Another problem that many clients are worried about is how to get footage from China. As mentioned earlier, Google is blocked in China. So forget Google Drive or Dropbox. Wetransfer is not ideal either. Sometimes it works well with VPN, but sometimes it doesn’t. For footage of less than 50 GB, maybe you can give it a try with a pro account. But be prepared that it takes time and may stop after a while. Baidu cloud is the most popular way to send large files inside China. But again, as with WeChat, it could be difficult for foreigners to install and register. If you don’t read Chinese or have a Chinese phone number, we don’t recommend it either.

• Google Drive

• Dropbox

• Wetransfer

• Baidu cloud

• MASV

• Filezilla

• Shipping a hard drive

MASV is something worth trying. You get a link on their website and send it to your crew, it’s easy and works well the most of time if the footage is not too large, but it demands VPN as well. If you have an FTP account, you can also try Filezilla. But according to our experience, it may only work 50% of the time. You’d better try it with your crew before the shoot, as it works in other places in the world doesn’t mean it works in China.

The best way to send big files (over 100GB) from China is by shipping a hard drive. It could take 3 to 5 days to arrive in the US or Europe. The cost of shipping as well as a hard drive could be around 150 USD, depending on the destination. It could save a lot of time and energy. You don’t need to write to your crew every day to check if other options work or not.

What Focus Film China usually does with large files is send the interview audio as soon as the shoot is done so the client can get it translated immediately. If it’s very urgent, we would advise our client that we ship a hard drive the same day or the day after the shoot. In the meantime, we try to upload the footage using all the possible options one by one.

If you have questions about how to communicate with Chinese crews or how to get footage from China, please write to us at info@focusfilmchina.com 

We are happy to help you out with our 10-year experience shooting in China.