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Scratch disks, asking for advice to newbies
I’m an experienced PC editor but a newbie to FCP. I promise I’ll go looking this up in the manuals, but was wondering if you can give me some shoot-from-the-hip advice on setting up scratch disks. I’m just starting to self-teach on a new FCP system with AJA IO, and ran into something that has me scratching my head…about scratch disks. When you only have one drive.
I’m digitizing some uncompressed SD analog. I’ve laid in probably three hours of it. Here I am around midnight, I need to grab just a few minutes more to finish the darn job (ain’t that always the way?) when the thing stops cold during the grab and tells me my scratch disk is full, I gotta move stuff out of it or create a new one.
My setup has one pretty nice RAID on it, half a terabyte maybe. It came pre-configured with a partition labeled “video”. In stumbling around with system prefs and trying to assign another scratch disk, I created one in the main partition (not video). I was too nervous and tired to gamble on dragging files around in case FCP needed them.
Anyhow, it’s working, but I’m probably putting files in places they oughtn’t. In the morning, when I’ve had some rest, I wanna come in and make everything “right”. The project has to stay on the system for several days yet, once it’s approved, I have to put it through compressor for the web guys. I need to consolidate all the files into one proper bin in the proper partition and not leave anything out.
What nuggets can you offer me? Sorry if I’m not more clear, it’s been about 20 hours since I ZZZZZZZZZ…….
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1 Reply
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[Mark Suszko] “My setup has one pretty nice RAID on it, half a terabyte maybe. It came pre-configured with a partition labeled “video”. In stumbling around with system prefs and trying to assign another scratch disk, I created one in the main partition (not video). I was too nervous and tired to gamble on dragging files around in case FCP needed them.”
Never put any media on your main system drive. That will lead to crashes and problems very very quickly.
All media needs to be put on a separate drive or array, either internal or external. I never partition any of my arrays, so in your case, I would simply have a 500GB RAID show up as one drive. 3 hours of uncompressed is not 500GB so that drive must have had some other stuff on it. If you don’t care about that stuff, my first advice is to erase the drive and set it up as one partition. In fact anytime you get a new harddrive, simply erase it before you use it, even if it shows up on the desktop.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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