AE CS5 is filling up my startup disk.

[Michael Szalapski]

What makes you think it’s AE that’s filling up your startup disk? What sort of files are you seeing?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Ethan Gallo]

Well, AE and safari are the only 2 things running and my disk space went from 2.5 gb free (which granted isn’t a whole ton) to 200ish mb over the course of a few hours of rotobrushing without actually exporting anything from AE or creating any other files from anything else. Safari was streaming music and safari obviously has a cache running as well but that’s a way huge amount of space for a web browser cache to take up so I figured it was AE. Also disk cache is disabled in AE prefs, so that’s not it either. I’m kind of baffled. I’m used to encountering these types of problems in FCP due to a careless capture scratch setting or similar goings on, but as I am a relitavely newish AE user I wasn’t sure if there were any other active folders that needed to be set to an external.

Thanks for the quick response by the way.

[Ethan Gallo]

p.s. i am not seeing actual files being created anywhere but am rather assuming it’s AE dumping files somewhere that I do not know about.

[Ethan Gallo]

Hmmm, the project is only 37 mb and is also stored on my external. Where might I look for the rotobrush data to see where it is being stored?

[Ethan Gallo]

Will do. Thanks for the advice gents.

Ethan Gallo-

[Todd Kopriva]

What about you media cache?

BTW, you really, really need to be working with a larger hard disk (preferably multiple). A nearly full hard disk is a performance destroyer.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Ethan Gallo]

Like I said, my startup disk is quite on the full side. I never ever use drives like this as working drives. The startup disk is for personal data. I am working off of a FW800 external with 1.5tb of free space. No worries. All of my AE files are on said external, so I think it is AE dumping clips somewhere onto my startup disk by default.

Ethan Gallo-

[Ryan Pardeiro]

Hi Ethan,

Did you ever come to a specific conclusion on this issue? I am having the same problem and can’t seem to find an answer. I’m also a bit new to adobe products. Coming from FCP. I’m actually using Premiere Pro CS5.5 but the problem is the same. I’ve routed every scratch disk, media cache and database cache I can find to my external drive but every time I render or even try to export video to my external drive it fills up the startup disk on my mac. I’ve lost gigs and gigs of space to this issue that I can’t seem to get back. I’ve deleted as much as I can off the startup disk to keep working and I’ve run out of things to delete. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ryan

[Ethan Gallo]

Hi Ryan,

If I understand correctly you’re having the same issue, only with Premiere Pro CS5? If so, I did find a workaround. After researching the issue i found that a lot of users of Premiere have also been plagued with this problem. I too am primarily a FCP 7 user and capture scratches, render caches etc have always been easy to set up which is why it Premiere was driving me nuts when I was considering switching. What I had to do was start a new project, let Premiere have its way with setting the scratch disks to default (UserName/Documents I think) then once I have the new project open, change the scratch info in preferences and go from there. I cant remember if I saved my old project to XML and then re-imported in the blank project, or if it let me copy sequences. But either way, using this method seemed to set things properly on my system, working off of an external. I was considering switching from FCP to Premiere permanently, but its still a little too buggy for me. I’ll use it when I’m working on a project that has a lot of After Effects elements to take advantage of Adobe Dynamic Link, but other than that I’m sticking with FCP for now. So give the above suggestion a try. It worked for me, it may work for you, but no guarantees. I don’t know if Adobe addressed the issue in CS 5.5 but I know with 5 a lot of users were getting mixed results with workarounds.

Ethan

Ethan Gallo-

[Ryan Pardeiro]

Thanks for the response Ethan. I’ll give your suggestion a try but it leaves me with one more question. Did you ever figure out where these seemingly invisible render files are being kept? Assuming I switch to a new project and that stops any new files filling my startup disk, what about all the old files that filled the disk up to this point? Where can I find them to delete them off the drive and get my storage space back? Over the course of the couple of months that I’ve been working on this current project I fear I’ve lost quite a bit of storage to this problem. I’d hate for that to be permanent just because I can’t find these files and delete them.

Ryan