Importing multiple sequences

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Kilburn] “Would it help if I first pre rendered each individual sequence before importing to the main Premiere project?”

How much RAM do you have in your system and how big / fast is your media array? Two big factors in large project responsiveness.

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

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

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[Joe Kilburn]

Thanks a lot for the reply.

I have 24 gigs of RAM with 6 terabytes in total space on various partitions (although I’m down to 225 GB free on the C drive thanks to this project). To be honest, I’m not completely sure of my disk speed… I have an experience index score of 5.9 in data transfer rate if that helps.

Would it help if I import one sequence at a time and completely pre render each one as I go?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Kilburn] “I have 24 gigs of RAM with 6 terabytes in total space on various partitions (although I’m down to 225 GB free on the C drive thanks to this project). To be honest, I’m not completely sure of my disk speed… I”

So you’re running media off your main system drive? Not a good idea at all. And having your main system drive down to that little of space will certainly slow you down. Media spread out over multiple partitions isn’t helping matters. That will slow things down greatly and cause performance issues.

[Joe Kilburn] “Would it help if I import one sequence at a time and completely pre render each one as I go?”

Nope. Still going to have load up all the media. You need more RAID space probably. General rule of thumb is to have twice the RAID space as your raw media. So if you need 3TB for your raw media, you want to have a minimum of 6TB of available space for your project.

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

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

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[Joe Kilburn]

Okay. I’m actually loading all my media from two separate storage partitions (I wanted to keep it exclusively to one disk, but was forced to bring another one into the mix when that one filled up).

I only have my OS and applications on the system drive.

Here’s a picture of my setup:

For this project, I have video files stored on both the J and S drives (again, I was forced to include the S drive as the J drive began filling up).

The E and F drives are external USB and quite slow. I only use them for backup.

Maybe you can give me some advice on how to rearrange this mess so as to avoid issues like this in the future. The C and J drives are two internal drives which are part of a RAID array. The S drive is also internal but not part of the array. I can’t do it until this project is finished, but would it help if I added the S drive to the array and make one big storage disk?

Back to the issue at hand, what would you advise I do to make this project work? Just import all the sequences and let Premiere chew on it for a while?

Thanks again.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Kilburn] “but would it help if I added the S drive to the array and make one big storage disk?
“

No because you’re still way too full on both sets of drives so combining them is just going to be one very large RAID with very little room left.

[Joe Kilburn] “Back to the issue at hand, what would you advise I do to make this project work? Just import all the sequences and let Premiere chew on it for a while?”

That seems to be your only option short of purchasing a new RAID and pushing all the media over to that.

Or if you have room for more RAM, that wouldn’t hurt either. We actually have 48GB RAM in the lone Dell we have here and it’s noticeably faster than the Macs with Premiere Pro.

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

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

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[Joe Kilburn]

Okay… I actually wouldn’t add the S drive to the array until I finish this project. But would that make sense for future reference?

How about my C drive? Does that seem to have ample total space? Am I taking the right approach in separating the system drive from my storage partitions?

Thanks.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Kilburn] “Okay… I actually wouldn’t add the S drive to the array until I finish this project. But would that make sense for future reference?”

It will definitely give you more speed in the future. I don’t run any internal RAIDs here in my shop, everything is external.

Your C Drive certainly still has plenty of room on it.

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

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

Blog Twitter Facebook

[Joe Kilburn]

Okay. Also, would it help if the project files associated with the videos be in the same drive? I only put videos on the S drive. All my project files and other associated files (audio, etc.) are on the J drive.

Worst case scenario, I’ll have to export each individual project as an H.264 and import those back into Premiere and export the whole thing again as one big H.264… I’m wincing at the double compression, but it may be the only solution.

Is there a compression method in PP you’d recommend to cut down on the loss?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Kilburn] “Okay. Also, would it help if the project files associated with the videos be in the same drive? I only put videos on the S drive. All my project files and other associated files (audio, etc.) are on the J drive.”

Project files live on your main system hard drive.

All media files should live together in the same place. Not sure why you’re separating audio from your video. We put ALL media into one folder structure in one place. Video, Audio, Graphics, Exports, Music, etc… One location. Very efficient for the system to pull the media for the project.

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

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

Blog Twitter Facebook

[Joe Kilburn]

Ordinarily I do keep everything together. Because of my disk space issue on J, I had to put some video files on S away from the associated project files.

I actually save the project files to my storage disk. I like to keep them off my system disk in the event that I reformat (which I do fairly often to my C drive).

Is having the Premiere installation on a separate disk from its associated projects slowing things down as well?

Really sorry for the noob questions here…