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Is separating video files on different drives still necessary or recommended?
Hello,
Back in the days of DV and Power Macs, to speed up disk access and improve the performance of Final Cut Pro, professionals strongly recommended installing FCP on the system drive, placing the DV source files on a second internal hard drive, and the render files on a third hard drive.
That’s what I did on my G3 400 back in the 2000s, and then on my G4 when I resumed editing in 2024 after a long hiatus.
Today, on my dual-processor G4 1.25 GHz with 2 GB of RAM, I’m working on a project based on DV rushes that I’ve decided to include in an HD sequence (1920x1080i) so I can combine the two pillar bars and use that black space to add brief comments and small maps.
Now, an HD image being much larger than an SD DV image, I often face long—or even very long—rendering times, and I can’t even begin to imagine how long it will take to create the final export of my future movie, which will be around 2 hours and 20 minutes long.
To try to alleviate this rendering time issue, I recently bought a used (my financial resources are extremely limited) Mac Pro 3.1 (early 2008), featuring two 4-core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors, 16 GB of RAM, the original ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, a 320 GB SSD, and a 1 TB SATA hard drive.
My question is: Is separating video files—which was recommended back in the DV era—still necessary and advisable on such a Mac Pro, whether for basic DV SD or more CPU-intensive HD editing?
Thank you in advance for your opinions and advice.
Best regards.
Pierre
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15 Replies
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Hi,
Yes, I remember those days. Not only FCP but some other NLEs, which don’t even exist today was recommended to work that way. This is not an issue anymore. You can place your footage anywhere on the drive. Based on your computer specifications, if your footage can fit into your SSD drive, you can transfer all your footage to your SSD and work there.
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Which is your boot drive, the SATA drive or the SSD?
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Many thanks, Devrim, that’s pretty much what I thought and I’ll keep that in mind. 🙂
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Jeremy,
The boot drive is the SSD, which is a 120 GB SSD, and not a 320 GB SSD as I incorrectly wrote in my initial post.
In light of what Devrim said, considering that the SSD has 99 GB free and I don’t plan to install much of anything on it apart from Final Cut Studio 5.1, there should be ample space left on the SSD to accomodate my 3 hours of DV source files, which is about 40 GB total.
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That’s going to fill up fast, especially if you start rendering. At the very least, you can point your scratch disk settings to the SATA so you won’t fill up your SSD.
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Exactly, you can target the SATA drive for rendering. And you can check and delete it every few days if needed. But I guess it shouldn’t require too much rendering unless you start to build heavy effects.
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Jeremy,
You’re quite right. I’ve already noticed that on the G4: the HD I use for renders is filling up quite fast and I probably would have had to add my fourth HD as a render disk.
However, now that I have the Mac Pro, the 1To SATA HD is almost empty, which makes it a prime destination for renders as well as for the export of the final movie once I’ve completed the editing.
On a side note, what about connecting my existing G4 to my Mac Pro using a Firewire cable and booting the G4 in Target Mode? If I am not mistaken, that would allow me to access the source files currently stored on the G4 and continue editing my movie on the Mac Pro.
Roughly the same FCP setup (with a few adjustments regarding the drives used), but FCP would run on the 2 faster Xeon processors and with 16 GB of RAM, which I believe is enough for basic 1920x1080i HD and should therefore boost editing speed.
The idea being that accessing the source files on the G4 via FW would obviously take longer than having them on the SSD, but once the clips loaded in the Mac Pro RAM, processing would be faster…
What do you think?
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You could try it, but I don’t think that would be the best way. How much footage is on the g4?
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Devrim,
Thanks. 🙂 No, no heavy effects needed other than in the opening sequence. Some image quality correction and simple text overlays here and there. Other than that, it’s just DV moved all the way to the left of the frame, leaving the 2 pillar boxes combined to the right for comments and maps on the black background.
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Well, if you’re talking original DV footage for that project, it’s only the 3 DV 1-hour source tapes, which is about 40 GB.
FW would be a convenient way to load them onto the Mac Pro’s SSD, unless going through my NAS using the 1Gb Ethernet link would be faster. But that would require uploading from G4 to NAS and then downloading from NAS to Mac Pro, which might very well offset the potential time-saving…
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