Where is the best place for video files?

[Drorsh4]

Hey,
Working on A\V projects (music or post production), on PT and Nuendo.
Where is the best place to put the videos files in ?
Now they are in the "Projects" HDD - in separate folder called "Videos".

Should it better be somewhere else for better performance?

[Jesse Peterson]

I keep my videos on a separate drive. Not the Application drive and not the Audio drive.

Though truth be told, I do this due to superstition, and I see pretty poor native video performance in both platforms no matter where it's reading video from.

[Drorsh4]

Thank you but there must be some kind of "tech" answer to that issue.

[SDDP]

Jesse's answer was correct. The tech reason is, when you are mixing, editing, recording or what not, you are constantly reading and witting to the audio drive. If there's video in the session, you want the computer to access the data separately via another internal drive that also meets specs, 7,200 rpm or higher and it's a general rule of thumb to not have the drive with more than 75% capacity. I have a TB drive and hover around 200-300 GB of video. This way all the seek times of reading and writing to the audio drive for your session and having your video on another drive keeps date coming in and out a LOT smoother and faster. Hence this is the reason you shouldn't have your sessions on the boot drive. It makes the system work much harder accessing it's on resources, then that of the audio session and video. But when everything is on separate drive, the computer works less at retrieving and writing data. For huge sessions like a 5.1 film that's 2 hours, this is standard.

[UnderTow]

If your harddrive is fast enough to deliver the audio and video on time for the DAW, it doesn't matter. If the drive is not fast enough it is best to separate the media.

What determines if the drive is fast enough? Well the actual speed of the drive itself (rotational speed, number of platters, cache memory, controlling electronics etc), how full it is, how fragmented it is (not really an issue these days), the bandwidth of the video you are using, the number of audio tracks, the bit depth and sample rate of the audio, the caching mechanisms of your drive, of your OS, of the DAW application etc etc

Personally, considering how cheap drives are (even now despite the floods in Thailand), I think it is always best to use multiple drives if you can. One for the OS, one for your project audio, one for video and one for your sample library.

Alistair

[danijel]

Or if you have lots of memory, read Alistairs great thread about RAM drives and run everything from RAM!

[UnderTow]

Originally Posted by danijel

Or if you have lots of memory, read Alistairs great thread about RAM drives and run everything from RAM!

Thanks Danijel. For anyone interested, here is the thread: RAM Drive for lightening fast DAW response

Alistair

[Drorsh4]

thanx guys,

It works fine on my WD black caviar - my HDD for my projects. but after reading Ill try with separate drives, just to see how it goes.

I'll also going to read the RAM thread.

thank you.