Cleaning up your Hard Drive post production

[Zane Barker]

[Lawrence Eaton] “I’m getting that wonderful message telling me that I need to improve my hard drive space”

What exactly does that message say? I think you may be interpreting it incorrectly.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Dave Johnson]

I agree with Zane … you shouldn’t have space issues with 60% of a drive free so perhaps you’re interpreting the message incorrectly.

With that said, to more directly answer your question about freeing up space …

Yes, you can delete anything in your “Autosave Vault”, IF you are certain the primary project files for each of the projects in there are the version you want to keep and not corrupt. My Autosave Vault is empty most of the time since I only leave stuff in there while I’m actively editing a project.

Yes, you can delete everything in your “Render Files” and “Audio Render Files” folders, IF you are fine with having to re-render each project if you need to go back to it. I trash my render files after I complete and master each project since I don’t trust render files after they’ve sat around for too long anyway.

Only delete things in your “Capture Scratch” IF if you batch captured them (correctly) and can, therefore, redigitize without affecting your edits AND if you’re willing to spend the time to redigitize.

Thumbnail Cache and Waveform cache are not really worth talking about, in my humble opinion.

[Victor Perez]

Is the 500 GB drive an external drive or your System drive? Depending on what you are editing and if you are only using firewire 400 it is difficult to tell if the problem is due to a drive not being able to handle your media or not. There is also the possibility that what you have in your sequence is too much for your machine to handle, Full HD for example. here I am guessing you are editing DV. With that in mind 200 GB should be more than enough free space. I do not think that removing temp files like the AUTOSAVE VAULT will solve your slow hard drive message. I have seen this appear when video clips or render files have been mistakenly placed on the System drive. Also remember that the Autosave Vault is your friend for a number of reasons. I would first make sure all your media and renders have been going to the correct place, in this case that external HD.
In FCP I would first right click on the Sequence file in your Browser.
Select Reconnect media.
In the Reconnect Files window notice your drive in bold type under the main heading ONLINE FILES.
As you scroll down the list make sure all of your media and renders are going to the same place and not your System drive.
Click CANCEL to go back to FCP.

good luck,

Victor

[Lawrence Eaton]

Many thanks to all that replied with help.
After nearly two months I believe I’ve come up with the answer to this and a couple of other matters that were affecting the production of WMV’s.

After talking with Telestream, yesterday on how Motion kept crashing out with the message along the lines of “The WMV Flip4Mac plugin is causing errors..” I contacted support at F4M and received a new build of F4M HD Studio and this appears to have cleared up both performance and production problems.

Reading this, it appears a little odd that a plug-in could affect overall machine performance and production but since installing F4M Build 2.2.3.4 my mac is currently running lickety split and WMV production (while disliked intensely)is now possible without waiting for “Unknown rendering time” messages appearing.

I’m bemused but a happy camper.

Regards

Lawrence Eaton