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Multiple Scratch Disks
Aloha to All:
Concerning Scratch Disks, I have (2) 1TB ext hard drives. Is it smart to have 1 drive designated the video/audio capture drive and the other the video/audio render drive? I’m doing this because I believe it takes up too much space on a single drive and slows down the render time. Please verify if I’m correct and if this is suggested practice.Mahalo Nui Loa:
-Charles- -
4 Replies
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It depends on how much material you intend to capture, format of video and they type of hard drive too. (Firewire, Esata etc) Depending on this you could use one drive as a back up for the other (Using an app like SuperDuper! or RAID them to spread the load. What video format are you working in? Are you going to be doing any intensive compositing of graphics/FX work?
Cheers,
Simon. -
Thank you Simon for responding.
Some background, I’m a marine biologist using video to collect data so I’m not doing any heavy graphics work. I do sometimes sell my clips to a HD station but I just send them the raw footage. I am shooting 1080i HD so I have my FC setting to HDV1080i60.
Currently, I have 60hrs of tape that is taking up approx 700gb on a 1tb ext harddrive so I was thinking of setting the other 1tb ext hd as the video/audio render drive and using it as the drive where the actual FC file is stored. In other words, 1 ext hd is used for capture purposes only and the other is for storing the actual working fc file (*.fcp) and for video/audio rendering. Is this a suggested set-up? If not, what would be recommended?Thanks again.
-Charlie- -
Thank you Simon for responding.
Some background, I’m a marine biologist using video to collect data so I’m not doing any heavy graphics work. I do sometimes sell my clips to a HD station but I just send them the raw footage. I am shooting 1080i HD so I have my FC setting to HDV1080i60.
Currently, I have 60hrs of tape that is taking up approx 700gb on a 1tb ext harddrive so I was thinking of setting the other 1tb ext hd as the video/audio render drive and using it as the drive where the actual FC file is stored. In other words, 1 ext hd is used for capture purposes only and the other is for storing the actual working fc file (*.fcp) and for video/audio rendering. Is this a suggested set-up? If not, what would be recommended?
Also, can you name the folder structure I should expect with this configuration?Thanks again.
-Charlie- -
there are a few factors to consider Charles
if performance is what you are striving for then “striping” the two drives together in a RAID 0 configuration would be a worthwhile option to consider. the 2 drives appear as a single mounted volume with double their individual capacity and near double the throughput … but if either drive died for whatever reason then you would lose all your data
if data security is your prime concern then you could stripe the two drives together as a RAID 1 (mirrored) pair. in this case the 2 drives would appear as a single mounted volume with the capacity of only a single one of the drives and with slightly impaired performance (as compared to a single drive) … but behind the scenes both drives would hold identical data sets so that should 1 drive fail for whatever reason then all your data would still be safe and transparently accessible from the second drive
however, judging from your post I’m not sure that either of these options is actually what you’re after. rather it sounds like you just want to make best use of your additional storage capacity in the simplest fashion
in that case you have two options:
you can specify the second drive as a second scratch disc for capture AND renders … this allows FCP to decide which drive to use based on the space available, and it will try to spread your data evenly across the two drives. this is beneficial as it means your discs performance will deteriorate as one drive fills to capacity whilst the other remains empty
or you can specify one drive as the capture scratch and the second for renders, as you suggested yourself. given that you are working in HDV then the chances are you routinely generate a lot of large render files, so splitting those renders off to a second dedicated drive is a good and valid idea … and yes, there is some performance advantage to maintaing separate render and capture scratch discs
regarding storing your project files on the renders drive, well that is fine, but the most important thing is to ensure that you do NEVER locate the Autosave Vault on the same drive as your store your working project files. remember: you can always recapture / rerender media, but if you lose your project file and your autosave copies of the same then you are going to have to start your edit from scratch
hope it helps
Andy
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