Where to put preview files?

[Rob100]

Hi,

For smooth playback from the timeline in MSP where's the best place to put preview files? On the capture disc (where source clips are) or on the boot disc or on another disc all together?

Just wondering what everyone finds best?


Rob.

[wkulecz]

I think this is one of those things that will generate a lot of arguements from the old-timers when drives were slower and the best systems marginal for video editing.

These days even with lowly UDMA33 and PIII-500 I've had no problems with previews on the system drive (C and video on other drives (D:, E running W2K.

Premiere6 defaults to putting preview files on the same drive as the video files and this has caused me no problems so far either, and is convienent when using a 1394 drive on different systems as the previews move with the editing project and raw clips--saves re-rendering previews when the drive is moved

Conversly if you are having problems playing timeline back to tape, moving the preview files to a different drive should be the first thing tried as a fix.

At least for small DV projects with MSP6, I've had no troubles with everything on a single drive except for an older (Dell Inspiron 7500) notebook computer where everything works for capture and editing but export to tape just can't be done from the internal drive. This was a surprise as I was not expecting to be able to capture DV to the notebook's internal drive, it seems output to tape is a good bit more demanding than is capture.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

Put 'em in a folder on the video disk. It's not a matter of speed, it's a matter of the boot disk not being able to do two things at once: play a temp file (which is usually a transition or filter effect) and use the swapfile.

Even with a fast boot drive writes and reads to the boot drive can and will cause interruptions in throughput of the temp files when system events occur.

Examples: swapfile I/O, other temp file & primary/slave device events etc.

Placing the temp files on the video drive get them out of the way of such system events.

Also, in many cases those temp files can fill the boot drive leaving the swapfile nowhere to expand to. If this happens the common result is the editor throwing an "out of memory" error. Not physical memory, but virtual memory.

Tis better to separate them.

Dr. Mordrid

[This_Idiot]

It's a perennial problem, and as has already been pointed out is less of a problem these days because HDs are inherently faster and also have more efficient built-in caching.

Boy, you sould have heard us rip at one another when it came down to which header to connect which drive to

Still, the golden rule is to use two drives, one for your OS and swapfile and the other to capture video to. If you can manage it, then making this capture drive exclusive to capturing video will pay dividends - using it to save your Word files to will fragg it to bits !

That isn't to say that it isn't possible to run a cheap system with a single drive without encountering dropping problems - I used a Rainbow Runner (before they started calling it "Studio") for a long time capturing to the only HD in my PC. By capturing 1/4 frame I could get away without drops and the footage back on tape looked every bit as good as a direct VCR to VCR transfer.

Chris
(T_I)