Hi all. I'm trying to set up a system to make best use of VMS7 with two hard drives. I've searched this and various other forums, but I've found conflicting advice. I have two reasobably large SATA drives. The C: drive is 750GB and the D: drive is 250GB. Win XP and VMS are on C. It's not clear, at least to me, where best to assign the various other files VMS uses/creates.
I'll be editing primarily HDV content captured from a Canon HV20. I will most likely use the CineForm intermediate codec for this, rerender to MPEG2 for export back to tape, and also rerender to NTSC SD DVD. I'm guessing there will be a lot of read/write disc activity and the objective is to read from one disk followed by writing to the other to the maximum extent possible.
I've seen reccomendations to put all VMS files except the application itself, on the D: drive. I've seen advice advocating only rendered files going on D: and various other arrangements in between. My assumptions are these:
- Once started, VMS itself resides primarily in RAM and while certain user actions may require VMS to load/reload some portion of the application into RAM, in general this does not occur with sufficient frequency to impact performance.
- Captured video files are only read, not written to. Editing causes the creation of various temporary or intermediate files, but does not alter the original captures. This is also the case with the CineForm, or other, intermediate file used for proxy editing of HDV.
- Rendering the final result requires VMS to read portions of either the original capture file or the intermediate, perform an appropriate conversion, and then write the result back to disk.
With those assumptions my thinking is this. VMS itself should reside on the C: drive. Captured HDV files also go on the C: drive. In order to generate the CineForm intermediate I will need to render the original HDV capture file. This is very read/write intensive so the intermediate should go on the D: drive. Once the CineForm intermediate has been created, all subsequently generated temp/preview files resulting from editing operations will either derive from data in RAM, or from data read from the intermediate residing on the D: drive. Therefore all temp files should be written to the C: drive. The final render operation reads data from the intermediate on the D: drive and writes the final output to the C: drive. Therefor -
Drive C: Captures, Temp files, Final Rendered Output.
Drive D: Intermediate file.
This seems contrary to what I have read, which usually counsels putting a lot of stuff on the D: drive. I am not sure what use VMS makes of temp files during render and I see that there is a clips folder who's function I am not sure of either. I imagine these may impact the issue, but I'm not sure how. I would appreciate any thoughts, recommendations, or clarification. Thanks.
Greg
I'll be editing primarily HDV content captured from a Canon HV20. I will most likely use the CineForm intermediate codec for this, rerender to MPEG2 for export back to tape, and also rerender to NTSC SD DVD. I'm guessing there will be a lot of read/write disc activity and the objective is to read from one disk followed by writing to the other to the maximum extent possible.
I've seen reccomendations to put all VMS files except the application itself, on the D: drive. I've seen advice advocating only rendered files going on D: and various other arrangements in between. My assumptions are these:
- Once started, VMS itself resides primarily in RAM and while certain user actions may require VMS to load/reload some portion of the application into RAM, in general this does not occur with sufficient frequency to impact performance.
- Captured video files are only read, not written to. Editing causes the creation of various temporary or intermediate files, but does not alter the original captures. This is also the case with the CineForm, or other, intermediate file used for proxy editing of HDV.
- Rendering the final result requires VMS to read portions of either the original capture file or the intermediate, perform an appropriate conversion, and then write the result back to disk.
With those assumptions my thinking is this. VMS itself should reside on the C: drive. Captured HDV files also go on the C: drive. In order to generate the CineForm intermediate I will need to render the original HDV capture file. This is very read/write intensive so the intermediate should go on the D: drive. Once the CineForm intermediate has been created, all subsequently generated temp/preview files resulting from editing operations will either derive from data in RAM, or from data read from the intermediate residing on the D: drive. Therefore all temp files should be written to the C: drive. The final render operation reads data from the intermediate on the D: drive and writes the final output to the C: drive. Therefor -
Drive C: Captures, Temp files, Final Rendered Output.
Drive D: Intermediate file.
This seems contrary to what I have read, which usually counsels putting a lot of stuff on the D: drive. I am not sure what use VMS makes of temp files during render and I see that there is a clips folder who's function I am not sure of either. I imagine these may impact the issue, but I'm not sure how. I would appreciate any thoughts, recommendations, or clarification. Thanks.
Greg