[Michael Carter]

I’ve tried compound clips, but I can’t maintain synch with those – cut a clip and everything slides sideways, and all those blank clips to deal with. Or does turning magnetic off solve that issue?

[Michael Carter]

Thanks guys, I’ll give these a try. For my usual B2B work X has been fine… but I do occasional music videos and “big corporate event cover band” promos with 20+ takes and frantic cutting… and that non-track timeline is a nightmare of stuff leaping up and down every time you blade a cut. I should probably just learn Premiere for those kinds of gigs.

[Michael Carter]

One strategy is to use a raid setup that’s non-redundant (fewer drives dedicated to the same data) and have a big external drive (non raid) that automatically backs up the raid every night, since unattended backups don’t usually need maximum speed. A plus to that strategy is your backup is a completely different physical machine than the raid, and you can even work directly from it if your raid dies and you’re in a pinch. And you’re not spending money for backup speed, just for working speed.

One thing to remember is though you would only lose one day’s work this way (with a raid failure before the nightly backup), you need to safeguard irreplacable data before backup – mainly don’t wipe your media cards until you know the backup has run. If you have a shoot day, load your footage and start trimming/editing, and your raid dies before the backup, you’ll still have the footage on the cards.

4K files are exponentially bigger than 1080; chances are, whatever you’ve considered a useful storage space for “live” jobs that haven’t been moved to an archive – triple or quadruple that. I was happily running a 2TB Raid and a 3TB backup; I ran out of room very quickly when I started shooting 4K…

[Michael Carter]

If your mac will boot from older OS versions, you can keep an external drive (or a drive partition) with just the system and the FCP apps, and boot from that as needed. I run FCP 6 on 10.7.5 with no issues, but it’s a 2009 Mac Pro. When I upgrade to X and a new mac this winter, I’ll need to make sure I can open old projects on the new machine, or I’ll have to keep a the old tower ready to go. Or you can buy a used laptop to open old projects and export the edit list for newer NLEs, if you need something more space convenient.

[Michael Carter]

Thanks Nick – I recalled using MM for similar stuff years ago, but the info I found on it lately seemed more about archiving – just what I was looking for, I’ll give it a go.

[Michael Carter]

Todd, thanks for the concise info.

Yep, I backup a couple terrabytes every night, automated. And yes, it’s saved my bacon once or twice.

So I’m thinking SSD for boot/apps and cache (I’d probably partition off half the drive for cache in that scenario, seems like good housekeeping for some reason). And two 7200’s for a basic RAID for project files.

Cool thing is, I’d have a slot for my current boot drive, so if I get in some upgrade hiccups I can still boot to the bug-free system in a pinch.

Every few months I archive 500GB or so of completed work, so I tend to hopscotch drives, use an older drive as an archive with a Voyager dock and update my work drives. That would give me the option to start the raid with spinning drives and upgrade to SSDs over time.

Thanks again, time to hunt down a video card.

[Michael Carter]

Thanks Todd –

Tell me about the best use of SSDs. I want to switch my boot drive over just for speed of launching.

I’ve searched all over for a clear answer for scratch disks though – my best guess is something like:

Boot drive: SSD – apps go here.
Drive #2: footage and files (AE & FCP documents and all footage)
Drive #3: Scratch with plenty of free space.

So for drives 2 and 3 – 7200RPM or SSD? And will either get a significant boost from a simple dual RAID? Or both drives? And to do this incrementally, which drive benefits the most from SSD or RAID?

Is the best-case scenario to have files and scratch as dual-SSD RAIDS? Or is SSD alone fine? Or is SSD file-handling not optimal for either of those uses?

There’s lots of contradictory info out there, and a lot of guessing as well – thanks for any insights.