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Rendering to NTFS Volumes on a Mac
Hi,
I’m using AE CS4 to output long TGA sequences (about 70,000 frames) for further processing at a different post house.
They require NTFS or FAT32 formatted external hard-drives. FAT32 cannot handle more than about 32000 files per directory so NTFS is the way to go. So I installed the Paragon NTFS driver, version 7. It’s almost as fast as a Mac formatted drive and works very well when I copy stuff onto it. So far so good.
BUT, here’s the weird thing: When I render the sequence directly onto the NTFS-drive with AE CS4, it is being slowed down massively, by the factor 10 or even 20. Rendering the sequence would take several days, compared to 4 hours when using a Mac-formatted drive. So I have to render to a Mac-formatted drive first, then copy to the NTFS drive. This is a waste of time and hard-disk space.
How is this possible? Does AE use some sort of low-level access to the file system and is thus slowed down by the Paragon NTFS driver? By the way, I’ve tried NTFS-3G as well, the result was even worse. (I use Mac OS 10.5.8 on an Intel-based Mac Pro, btw.)
Any idea/help is appreciated, thanks!
Kjell Peterson
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1 Reply
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[Kjell Peterson] “I have to render to a Mac-formatted drive first, then copy to the NTFS drive”
I work on both platforms too and that’s exactly what I do, but it isn’t a big deal to me since I prefer to have multiple copies of my work anyway. I actually never tried rendering directly to my NTFS formatted drives from my Mac since I assumed it would be far slower to render to an external FW800 than to the RAID system my Mac works from.
I know that’s not the answer you wanted, but I hope it helps some … perhaps someone else knows a way to render to an external NTFS on a Mac faster.
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