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Do FCPX use files from the cache when exporting your videos?
I am trying to make my system work more smoothly and I have learnt that one key is to keep files that are needed at the same time in different drives.
Now I have one external drive for media and libraries, and one for the cache. I usually export my final videos in the same drive I use for the cache, but I was wondering if adding a third drive could speed up the process. This would make sense if FCPX was actually using the files from your cache when exporting, but if it is starting from scratch it wouldn’t change anything. Hence the question. -
4 Replies
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If the Project is rendered, FCPX seems to use those files, yes, especially when exporting the same format (like ProRes render to ProRes export).
It would be easy to run a test of this. Move the cache, do the export with the Project rendered, then delete the cache, and redo the export with it unrendered and see which is faster.
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Also performance rests mostly with the GPU, CPU and the specs of hard drives. Splitting up to a 3rd drive is not likely to make much impact and might even slow things down a bit.
Noah
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Media and Libraries should be on Separate drives if possible. It’ll work fine if not, but X is constantly reading and writing to the Library, so having Media (and cache) on a different drive is ideal and you may get better performance. So adding a 3’rd (fast) Drive for cache couldn’t hurt.
Like Jeremy said, if your Project is rendering to the same format as the export, X will use the cache files when it writes the master, speeding things up. If you export at a different format than the project is set, it has to do it from scratch.
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Hello The Dude,
My setup is I keep my libraries on my internal SSD as it’s the fastest drive I have, but I put my cache on an external 1TB SSD drive via Thunderbolt. My media is on a Promise R4 Thunderbolt RAID
I do a lot of optical flow and sometimes those analysis files can get huge and bog down the system while being made so keeping them off the system drive is helpful.
The main reason I would say to have footage playback on one drive and export projects to another drive is if the drives are single platter drives. In that case one will be reading and the other will be writing your export. In this case separate drives do help.
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