Every tech has a core setup. Laptop, cables, drives, the obvious stuff. What takes longer to figure out is the layer underneath that. The small tools that quietly fix five-minute problems until they’ve paid for themselves ten times over.
This is what I bring to every shoot. None of it is glamorous. All of it has earned its place.
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Software
These run in the background on every shoot. Lightweight, out of the way, and they solve the kinds of problems that come up over and over when you’re juggling windows, files, and displays.
Window Management: Magnet
Capture One on the main display, a browser open for references, a Finder window for offloads, sometimes a client review screen. Screen real estate disappears fast. Magnet snaps and resizes windows with keyboard shortcuts so you’re not wrestling with them mid-shot. After a couple weeks you stop thinking about it, which is the whole point.
File Search: Raycast (and formerly Alfred)
I used Alfred for years and it served me well. I’ve since moved to Raycast, which does everything Alfred did plus clipboard history, snippets, window management, quick calculations, and a bunch more. It’s the first thing I install on a fresh system.
The actual use case on set: a client asks for a file from a shoot two weeks ago, you’re staring at three drives and a few thousand folders, and you find it in maybe ten seconds without breaking your conversation. That’s the kind of small win that adds up.
File Sharing: Dropover
AirDrop is fine when it works. Dropover makes it better. You drag a file onto a floating shelf, hold it there, and drop it wherever you need to, into AirDrop, into an email, into another app. When someone needs a quick file on set it’s faster than digging through Finder windows.
Remote Display Monitoring: Screening Room
If you’ve ever needed to see what’s on a display that isn’t in your line of sight, a wireless monitor across set, a client review screen in another room, Screening Room solves it. You can view non-mirrored displays right on your workstation. Useful for keeping an eye on things without standing up or running another cable.
Hardware
These have made it into my regular kit because they fixed a specific problem I kept hitting. Not every tech needs all of them. Each one earned its way in.
Label Maker: NIIMBOT
Labeling cables, drives, and cases pays off immediately. I use an older NIIMBOT M221, but the NIIMBOT B1 is a more affordable updated version. It’s small, prints clean labels, pairs with your phone. If you’re building organized kits (and you should be), a label maker speeds up the whole process. I covered labeling more in Improving Setup & Breakdown Times.
3D Printed SSD Sleeves for T7 Shield
If you use Samsung T7 Shield drives, you know the rubber cover is a pain. Hard to label, collects dust, and pulling it off isn’t great. These 3D printed slip-on sleeves snap over the drive and give you a clean flat surface for labels. No tape wraps, no modified covers. Small thing, big difference for drive management.
Cable and Accessory Organization: LVNA MAP System
The LVNA MAP system drops into a Pelican 1510 and gives every cable, adapter, card reader, and small tool a dedicated spot. Instead of digging through pouches, you reach for the slot. Pair it with a consistent pack routine and setup and breakdown both get noticeably faster.
Stream Deck With the Capture One Plugin
A Stream Deck gives you programmable physical buttons for any shortcut you use a lot. Paired with the Capture One plugin, you can map ratings, color tags, tool switching, and basically anything else to one press.
A concrete example from my layout: one button toggles the proof preview, a row of buttons handles 1 through 5 star ratings, another row handles color tags, and there’s a dedicated “process selects” button that fires off my export script. I’m not hunting for keyboard combos and my eyes stay on the screen. Available in standard and XL depending on how many buttons you want within reach.
The Point
None of these are groundbreaking on their own. Stacked together, they smooth out the friction that piles up over a long day. If you want more on how this fits into the bigger picture, Improving Setup & Breakdown Times for Digital Techs covers the prep and organization side.