I capture to my RAID drive first, then copy the files to my editing drive (SSD) and I render to either another drive or back to the RAID drive. To simplify it, I don't render to the same drive my source files are on or to the system drive.

It really depends on how fast your renders are, how many tracks of media you are using at once, and how big your media is (SD?, HD?, 4K?). Back in the days of DV when you could render as fast or faster than real-time, disk I/O could be a bottleneck. Today, I'm guessing that your render time is 2x, 3x, maybe even 5x real-time in which case it really doesn't matter if you render to the same drive your media is on because disk I/O is not the bottleneck, your CPU/GPU is.

For the record, I render to the same drive I have my media on and I have no problems at all but I'm only working in HD with only a single camera edit. YMMV

~jr

Thanks "you experts"

What I do is capture to one HDD then edit (re.VEG files with CC and other FX) and render out (Full HD, MP4 etc) on another HDD - I do not have SSD's . I just wanted to know if this is the "best" way.

Cheers

Honestly it doesn't really make much difference. Usually the rendering process takes so much longer than the read/write process than you might only see a difference of well under 0.1% in the time it takes. The only time it will make a noticeable difference is when you are able to smart-render without recompression, and in these cases the whole process is so much faster than recompression that it won't really matter if you save time or not.

Try this experiment: find a relatively large file, like maybe a couple hundred MB. Copy it to the same drive and time how long it takes. Now copy it to a different drive and time how long that takes. Pretty close to identical though the copy to another drive might be just slightly faster. This time difference, multiplied by the size of your output file, is how much rendering time difference you'll see. In tests i've done the difference has been a few seconds on an hour long render. Not worth worrying about.

As far a capturing to the RAID and then copying to a different drive, this strikes me as a complete waste of time. I can capture a 30Mbps stream to a "green" 5400 RPM drive while simultaneously rendering another project, recording audio, opening/editing/saving photos, doing some 3D renders, and a dozen other applications open all at the same time and never drop a frame. The days of dropped frames due to drive speed are about a decade behind us. Drive IO speed is an order of magnitude faster than it was 10 years ago. Single slow economy drives can store data faster now than a striped 15000RPM array could back then.