disk/folder management

weaver wrote on 2/27/2006, 9:32 AM

What is the best way to start a project so that all the files go to 1 single folder? I just upgraded to VMS6. When I "start" a new project ... I have to specify a project location, then when I "save" the project, I have to save it to the location I want, and then when I am capturing video clips ... I have to go deep into the capture video properties and set the location for where the video clips will be saved. If I don't do this ... files end up scattered.

Why can't I just start a new project (and specify the folder per the pop-up menu) ... and then ... as a default, VMS6 always work out of that folder for ALL the files that are saved and created?

thanks
IW

Comments

IanG wrote on 2/28/2006, 4:30 AM

For me, putting all the files for a project in one place wouldn't work - I'm using captured video, stills, music, externaly created titles and sound effects, and they're only related when they're part of the project. I want to keep things in their own folders! I admit that I use an additional package to help organise my media, but even so I don't believe I'd ever want to keep everything in one place.

Cheers

Ian G.

volzjr wrote on 2/28/2006, 7:54 AM

I'm with Weaver on this one. I do a lot of projects for church, at least one a week. Typically 3-5 minutes videos. I always start each project with a new folder on my external HD, and all clips, stills, graphics, renders, etc go into this folder. I then periodically transfer the folders to DVD discs and file them for future reference, and clear the originals off the HD to re-gain the space. But the biggest pain about this is that each step of the way, VMS and AS assume the default folder is the one I used on the previous project, and I have to navigate to the current project's folder. It does get tedious. I can see the value in having a checkbox in the preference's area to "save all new items in the current project folder", or something to that effect. You could then un-check it for folks like IanG whose workflow does not require it. Just my .02.

weaver wrote on 2/28/2006, 9:36 AM

Are you saying you put all the music in one folder? ... all the captured video in another folder? all the rendered video in another folder? Do you uniquely name each captured video?

I find I have to at least keep things off my C: drive - or else it fills up. Therefore I keep working off an external drive. If I don't pay attention, VMS keeps wanting to save things in My Documents etc on my C:drive. If files are scattered I loose track of what belongs to any single project. For example, when capturing video I always use the default name (unknownclip001, unknownclip002 etc). I can't be bothered to individually name every clip.

IW

Paul Mead wrote on 2/28/2006, 10:29 AM

I'll add my vote for this kind of functionality. A "New Project" wizard that gave you the options of picking a new location for the various files would be nice.

rustier wrote on 2/28/2006, 10:37 AM

just a foot note - if you want to reduce your render time significantly put your raw data and operating system on one drive, and your rendered file on another drive. I have sata drives and this made huge difference.

Tim L wrote on 2/28/2006, 5:31 PM

I also vote for the "keep everything together in one project folder".

I've gotten more organized about it lately. Instead of one big folder with everything in it, I generally have a project folder, and within that have folders for video, photos, frames, etc.

I have a 160GB USB external drive that I got just before Christmas (for about $80 after rebates?) One good thing about using the external drive is that the file paths are now much shorter. I now have g:\project\... instead of the default C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Videos\project\..., that I used to use.

g:/project
........../video
........../photos
........../music
........../frames (still frames saved from video...)
........../dvd (MPEG2 & DVD Arch files here..)
.................../dvd image

Tim L

Chienworks wrote on 2/28/2006, 5:57 PM

"instead of the default C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Videos\project\...,"

There's no reason to use that even if you only have one drive. You could use C:\project\...

I always thought Window's ridiculously long paths were, well, kinda ridiculous.

Rv6tc wrote on 3/1/2006, 9:48 AM

From rustier: "if you want to reduce your render time significantly put your raw data and operating system on one drive, and your rendered file on another drive. I have sata drives and this made huge difference."

I thought you were supposed to have the OS and program files on one disk (the C: drive) and the media or project files on the other one. For me, the problem with putting the raw files on the C; drive is that I intentionally made that one smaller, so that it would just contain the OS.

Hmmmmm. I may have this backwards.

Chienworks wrote on 3/1/2006, 10:49 AM

It's a good idea to have all your media files on a separate physical drive from the system drive. Having them on a separate partition on the same drive doesn't give any speed benefit in the slightest.

The advantage of having source files and rendered files on separate drives is that the source drive only has to read and the destination drive only has to write, instead of one drive having to handle both operations. Once again, separate partitions on the same drive doesn't help.