Separate scratch and media Drives?

[Steve Eisen]

So there is no confusion on your part, your capture drive and scratch disc are the same thing.

What you need to do is separate your system drive which includes your OS and Applications from your captured media.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Daniel Wilson]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply but I don’t think I explained the question very well. My system drive is already separate and I definitely don’t put any media on that, but I’m talking about having two separate media drives. The first would be the scratch drive, which fcp writes to as it renders during editing. The second would be where I store all of my existing ingested media, ProRes etc, which fcp is only reading. I probably misused the word ‘capture’.

Thanks,
Dan

[Matt Lyon]

Daniel, the method you are describing (separate media and render drives) is the way I was taught to set things up “back in the day.” The thinking was exactly what you describe: avoid read/write operations to the same drive during render. But back in those days, disc i/o performance margins were much slimmer, so you needed all the performance you could find.

So these days it is maybe less critical? But it certainly couldn’t hurt. The only downsides I see are that it means your files aren’t all “in one place” should you need to move your system. Also, if you aren’t doing a heck of a lot of rendering, then your “render” drive might have loads of free space on it, which wouldn’t be the most efficient use of your resources.

hth,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Daniel Wilson]

Thanks for that advice Matt, it’s pretty much what I was hoping to hear.

Cheers,
Dan