Att: Walter: Project Files on system drive

[Rafael Amador]

[Wayne Marx] “I recall reading on the COW that you advocate putting the FCP project file on the system drive and not the external drive.

Can you explain why.”
Hi Wayne,
I don’t think Walter had ever advocated that.
Perhaps some post of him may be miss interpreted, but Walter has always advocated for the fastest external storage systems, as he uses.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Chris Tompkins]

Your proj. files can be kept anywhere really. But what you should do is keep them on an internal drive and not on the your media drives.
Back up proj. always.

The idea is if you lost your media/drives you will always have your proj. file(s) in which to restore your projects with.

I believe Walter had said keep them on you Mac HD, with the OS/Apps/Etc.

Keeping you Proj. files and Media on the same drive is just asking for trouble from which there is no recovery.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Walter Biscardi]

[Wayne Marx] “I recall reading on the COW that you advocate putting the FCP project file on the system drive and not the external drive.

Can you explain why.

Thanks in advance,”

Be glad to.

Your media arrays are constantly being written to and erased. This leads to a lot of fragmentation and a better chance of the array being corrupted. If the array gets corrupted you’ll lose your media for the project AND the project file itself. In other words, you’ve lost everything and have to start from scratch.

If you keep the project file on your internal System Drive, you may lose the media, but you’ll still have your entire project file to rebuild it. If the project was all capture from tape, you can simply redigitize everything. If it was all brought in from a tapeless format, simply re-copy everything back into the machine.

It’s a safety thing. Final Cut Pro Media on external media arrays. Final Cut Pro Project Files (and all Project files for that matter) on the internal system drive.

On all our Macs we have a folder on the root level of our main Mac HD called “Projects”. All our projects are save in there.

Hope that helps!

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Mark Laslo]

Hi Walter,

I wanted to get your opinion on a system that I use. I keep the project file with all the source media on a media drive, but I have autosave set to make a copy of the project every 5 minutes with the autosave library located on the system drive. I also have time capsule back up ever hour so technically most of the autosave files and the original project files are backed up to the timecapsule as well.

I’ve found this prevents me from losing the media and the project files in almost any circumstance.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Mark

[Max Frank]

Thanks for the insights,

Wayne

[Walter Biscardi]

I don’t use Autosave. I only use Command+S all the time. Been a habit since I started editing on NLEs.

I never ever put Project files on the external media drives.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Register now for our Open House March 5

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[Andy Mees]

That’s a perfectly good alternative system Mark … as long as you are keeping backups and source projects on separate drives, and at least one or the other is separate from your media drive(s) then you have the situation covered pretty much as well as you can.