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I was curious what the best approach is to saving sessions and content? Right now, I have all content/clips saved to an external hard drive, and I'm also saving the Premiere Pro Session to an external.
I was wondering if this was the best approach? What's the most ideal to keep Premiere from hang ups and such?
Thanks.
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First, immediately after creating a new project, do a manual save.
After each major step (at least) do another manual save. Ctrl/Cmd-s takes so little time
Use Save-as to make iterative copies routinely and work from the new project. Thus giving clear trails back if needed.
Use Save-a-copy set to another drive or network location routinely to keep a trail of the project elsewhere.
And use the auto-save as a pacifier.
Basic Computer 101, really. But you'd be amazed how many don't follow safe computing procedures that have been the norm for 30 years now.
Neil
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Neil,
Thanks! This all very helpful. And actually general practice for me at the moment. I’m an audio engineer who religiously uses Pro Tools, and all of this applies the same.
I guess my biggest question is, is it ideal to save eveything via an external (as in read/write off an external)? From my experience, it allows the OS X to preform as best as possible, isolating it to only OS X functions and Premiere Pro functions. When using Pro Tools, this has always been the approach to best optimise functionally of the DAW. I’d assume this applies to Premiere Pro too? I get some weird hang ups and lags in Premiere and I wanted to rule this process out first.
Thanks.
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I recommend working only from internal drives, saving externals and networked drives exclusively for backups and archiving.
As a starting point, I recommend five drives arranged as below for the best speed and organizational efficiency.
System (OS and Programs)
Projects (including audio and still image files in the project folder)
Cache & Scratch
Camera media and proxies only
Exports
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Jim,
Thanks for the response. I was curious if you could walk me through the idea behind this? Excuse my ignorance, but my knowledge of working with CPU intensive programs is that, reading and writing from the same drive that stores your OSX and the program, hinders both from working as efficiently as possible, as the program is forcing that drive to work harder as it’s also comminicating back and forth for data, all while trying to run the OS X and program itself. With that being said, an internal SSD drive would be loads faster than an external SSD reading and writing over Thunderbolt 2 (My current set up), but with that concept in mind, I’d assume the external would benefit. But again, this is why I’m asking. And I appreciate all the insight!
As as far as how you have folders laid out, this is super helpful.
Thanks
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reading and writing from the same drive that stores your OSX and the program
With the five drive setup I listed, that doesn't happen.
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Jim,
I misread. Looks like you stated using 5 separate internal drives. Unfortunately that is not a possibility for me. I’m using a Mac Mini with one internal 500g SSD. Though I could partition the drive, there would be minimal space, even if I’m only making short films. I plan to put in a second SSD, but for the time being, I’m stuck to the one drive.
Appreciate the insight and help!
Best
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If what you are doing with the drives works, continue doing it, although it may perform better with all on the internal SSD.
You should, however, have at least two backups of the media and project files, preferably one off site.
See Schofield's Second Law:
Follow Schofield's Three Laws of Computing and avoid disasters | ZDNet
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that is not a possibility for me. I’m using a Mac Mini
I maintain my advice. Make of that what you will.
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So I'm bringing this thread up again as I've moved on from a Mac Mini.
I recently switched to an i9 Macbook Pro.
With that being said, I was still curious the best approach to file organization and optimizing drives for performance.
Jim_Simon advised a 5 drive set up. Though this is more obtainable now, it is still not ideal for me. And I'm obviously still required to use external drives.
Currently, I have:
- 2018 15" Macbook Pro i9 | 32g | 1TB SSD | AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20
- Glyph 2TB Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Portable SSD (Read: 2800 Mb/s; Write: 2400 Mb/s) (x1)
- Glyph 1TB Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Portable SSD (Read: 2800 Mb/s; Write: 2400 Mb/s) (x1)
- Glyph 500G Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Portable SSD (Read: 2800 Mb/s; Write: 2400 Mb/s) (x1)
- Glyph 2TB Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Dock (Read/Write: 1500 Mb/s~) (x1)
- OWC 2TB Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Pro EX (VE) Rugged Portable SSD (Read/Write: 2800 Mb/s~) (x1)
My goal is to have a system that works well when I'm working from home or on the go. So with that being said, the way that I'm considering approaching this is while still being somewhat portable is:
Macbook Pro Internal SSD: Premiere Pro/After Effects/etc; OSX function
Thunderbolt 3 SSD: Project Files/Media (videos)
Thunderbolt 3 SSD: Media Cache/Scratch
Now obviously, I could utilize more drives, as I have 4 TB3 ports on the Macbook and the drives to do so; though I'd like to minimize if possible and potentially use other drives for backup or other content.
My questions are:
- Is this a legitimate approach (with respects to my enforced "limitations")?
- When saving Premiere Pro projects/sessions, should I save the session to the internal SDD or to the external SSD folder containing the original videos it links to (or it's own folder on an external SSD)?
- When saving scratch files, should I create a folder specific to projects or just let Premiere do the organization for me?
- If I choose to create proxies, should I save them within the Premiere Pro project/session folder or next to where the original media is sourced?
- If I choose to use the Glyph Dock for storing something listed above, with it having a slower read/write speed, what would be the best thing to store there (videos, media cache/scratch. etc)?
Excuse my ignorance if some of these questions seem obvious. I'm very new to video and it is more of a hobby for me, as my full time is an audio engineer. Some techniques applied in that world don't seem to translate the same.
My end goal is to have organization optimized to optimize Adobe functions. I want to be able to have things run as smoothly and consistently as possible.
Thanks in advance
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Anyone?
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Bump
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With high speed drives and connections the older 5 drive practice is still useful but not as needed.
With that setup, using the internal for OS, the faster external for projects, previes and cache files, save a medium speed one for exports, put media on the other pretty fast drives.
Neil
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Neil,
Thank you for the response. Very helpful.
What I'm currently doing is storing media and Premiere Project folder on the same TB3 external drive, media cache and media scratch on a second TB3 external drive, leaving the internal for just running Premiere and OSX
I'm curious if it's ideal to save the actual Premiere Project folder on the same drive as where media is kept?
Thanks
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Depends.
If you're doing jobs for clients then consolidation at end of job is easier if all moving assets stay together.
For a stand alone editor you might get faster playback with the arrangement I listed above.
Neil