Scratch disk best practices?

[Mike Velte]

1. , 2. and 3.
Each project has a project folder on your RAID with EVERY thing in it and set all scratch disc preferences to “Same as Project”

4. A sea of folders is not quite as bad as long as they are all in the same place.

[David Mack]

It just doesn’t feel right. The project file (*.prprj) sitting on a striped RAID? Also, the DVD encodes don’t need the RAID performance and so take up valuable RAID space. Le t me rephrase….Which of the files/folders I mention NEED to be on the RAID? Worst case, I don’t mind manually setting the scratch disk locations at the start of each session (why oh why can’t they be saved in the project????).

Is this how everyone sets it up? Any other systems?

[Mike Velte]

Captured video/audio and preview files should be on a non system drive…in your case the RAID.

[David Mack]

What about the media cache? Doesn’t it hold data related to HDV mpegs? In this case, does that data need to be rapidly accessed as part of HDV playback/capture? Lastly, the Media Cache Database – What exactly does that hold – any need for speed access to this database?

[Mike Velte]

Media Cache are conformed audio (cfa) which is the audio files created to match the project setting of 48Khz. These should be on your RAID.
It also contains pek files which are the waveforms on the timeline and now with CS3 update with gain changes…wha who!!

[David Mack]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the info so far – I appreciate it. One last question, if I can…. I notice there’s the media cache in the scratch disks section that you’ve described but there is also, elsewhere in the preferences the “Media Cache Database”. What does this contain? Should that be on the RAID? I take it it’s a global database that’ll contain data(?) from ALL your projects? So, what does it do?