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mystery files filling up system drive
Background: I have PPro CS5, I don’t use it much. I am familiar with premiere and have used it for years, but had to switch to FCP. I am editing a project where the video files are ripped from DVDs using MpegStreamClip “save as mpeg with mpeg audio” option. all legal, it is a court deposition. When I bought files into FCP, no audio. So I tried premiere. Set scratch discs to my external drives, etc. when I imported files, the drive they were on kept flashing for over an hour, but my scratch drive seemed oddly sleepy. I am on a mac, so I went to Macintosh HD>>get info…I could see the free space on the drive disappearing at an alarming rate, over 100 gb worth. I used an advanced search to look for files created recently…nothing. did a search for .pek and .cfa files…nothing. I cannot find these files anywhere. How do I free up this space once my edit is done? Thanks.
PS I displayed file sizes so I could see really big files and folders…nothing fits the bill ANYWHERE on the machine, internal or external drives, but the space is gone, and I need it back.Rich Kaelin
Kaelin Motion Production Services
https://kaelinmotion.com
New York -
5 Replies
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Not sure what to tell you re:Premiere, but there’s a great program called GrandPerspective that will let you visually understand existing files on any drive. If there’s something eating up space you should be able to see it, even if it’s composed of really small files.
https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
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Rich –
It sounds as if you may not have your system properly configured. It’s very important to tell Premiere Pro where you want your Cache files saved to. Here’s some important information on your setup:
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Are you referring to the scratch disks? as I said I set my scratched discs to the a to external drives. the really odd thing is I can’t see these files at all anywhere but I saw them taking up space. I watch does the counter continue to climb and the disk space available dropped. I understand how premier works but are there other cache files that I’m not aware of that do not go on the scratch disks?
Rich Kaelin
Kaelin Motion Production Services
https://kaelinmotion.com
New York -
There are “scratch” files determined by the project…video/previews, audio/previews…and then there are cache files…location determined in the application preferences.
In the case of MPEG with embedded audio, the audio is typically de-embedded and made into separate files that can be processed more quickly during editing and listened to during scrubbing the timeline, etc. Those audio files are uncompressed I believe and can get pretty beefy.
You may want to try going into your preferences>media and click on “clean” media cache database…this should basically release any unused media cache files and free up the drive space, but use a new project to do this as Premiere Pro will think all those files are still in use if you open the project that created them to access the preferences…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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GrandPerspective is fantastic. Saved my time, and space! Thank you! Found the files here: /Users/admin/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files. Audio .cfa files were filling the space, constantly surpassing a gigabyte, even when working on small video files! And they stay there, even after you close the program. So the option is to delete them.
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