[Todd Greer]

Thanks again John! The more I play with SVP, the more I see your suggestions making sense to me now. I’ve set up as you’ve recommended…and if you could indulge me two more questions here:

(As a quick memory jog, I’m the one with the laptop fixed drive and now an additional eSATA drive)

1) Given what you’ve said about the slow rendering (CPU intensive “bottleneck”) could I conceiveably now throw in an additional USB drive used solely to render to (and keep all your other suggestions in place) as an even bigger improvement?

2) After setting up my eSata drive, I also set up Windows to manage the PAGING FILE (swap file, virtual memory…whatever) on it. This is in ADDITION to the already existing paging file allocation that my original internal disk has on it. I still let Vista manage both (I don’t manually set the swap sizes). This has now given me twice the virtual memory in my entire system of course. Now, is this recommended “in general” for a “storage only” drive or should I turn it back off (for the eSata). Will this slow/speed SVP as well?

Thx, Todd

[Todd Greer]

First of all thanks so much John, Stephen and Alf! Your replies gave me more to think about than originally figured. I see now in SVP there are two places to select a TEMP directory as well as a PRERENDERED files directory. So, to basically “dumb it down” for me, if I have one physical hard drive (currently holding the progam itself as well as my raw video files in My Documents) and one new eSATA drive to help relieve the load, then:

My original hard drive would hold the SVP program (and Vista of course)
Which drive would best get the TEMP dir?
Which drive would best get the PRERENDERED dir?
Which drive SHOULD hold the original video files?
Which drive should I eventually RENDER to?

(I’m keeping the USB out of this scenario here…unless you feel it could/should be thrown into all this if it can help in conjunction with the eSATA addition.

Thanks!