Media Management

I have read all the reviews and watched the tutorial videos but I still have one question. Is it still the best practice to keep our media on fast external drives?

Dave

Yes.

Hi Dave,

This is still best practice, and it is a must for any serious editing work.

You can create all your Libraries on a fast external drive and physically store your imported media inside the Events in the Libraries (managed media), or you can store your media outside of the Libraries (external media) on the same drive or on another one.

Which option you choose pretty much depends on the kind of work you do. If you are a one-man-band and your projects are self-contained (every project uses its specific media), working with managed media is ideal. If you work in a collaborative workflow and/or you need to access media across different projects over time it is better to keep your media in a central media pool outside of your Libraries.

There has been talk about using the super-fast Flash SSD in the new MacPro to temporarily store the media of your current job and then move the media externally once the job is finished. I don't agree. SSDs are really good for launching apps and opening small-size files, but SSDs have their own problems with continuous reading and writing of larger files.

Of course if your work mainly consists of cutting small personal projects that don't require much media handling and you have a fast system with a large SSD there is no harm in working from the system drive at all. It's only when projects get larger and more complex that working off your system drive will negatively affect your system performance.

- Ronny

I agree with Ronny. The reason for a dedicated media drive is bandwidth. SSDs are fast, but they also have limited bandwidth, that streaming data can overwhelm, just like spinning platter drives. This is why RAID enclosures are a must for serious, high end work. And a T'bolt 2 RAID for serious 2K and 4K feature work.

Tom, Ronny and Ben

Thank you guys for taking the time to answer my question.

Dave

This is actually a really similar question to what I was going to ask as well.

On my 2011 MBP I have 256 SSD system drive, a 2nd internal 1TB HDD (replacing the optical bay), & an external 4TB G-Drive. Let's call the drives 1,2,& 3 for simplicity sake.

Currently I have Time Machine backing up drive #1 over onto a 500gb partition on drive #2. I use the other 500GB on drive #2 as media storage for current FCPX & Lightroom projects. I then use CarbonCopyCloner to back up all of drive 2 over onto drive #3.

The thought process is that I have a copy of my system drive both on-board & off of the MBP (who knows when sh*t will hit the fan). Then I also have a copy of media projects on-board as well as a copy on the external.


Does this workflow for media management & storage sound appropriate or is there a better way of doing this? Should I be trying to use the G-Drive (5200rpm HHD) to store the media directly on instead? It's USB 3.0 & not Firewire:(

Hi John,

I think that's a decent setup that ensures reliable system performance as well as a solid backup strategy. Just remember to turn Time Machine off while you are editing and turn it on again when you close FCPX. Having TM back up your system drive while you are editing will affect the performance of both your system drive, and also of your media drive as your TM uses a partition of your media drive.

Of course you could use the G-drive as your media drive and keep drive 2 exclusively for backups (TM and CCC), but as the G-Drive is only 5200 rpm I probably wouldn't do this.

- Ronny

Damn Ronnie, you're everywhere & helpful as always. Thanks.

What happens if the system crashed in the middle of editing? That's when I'd be the most upset about losing that time & work.

Does TM use more resources then CCC would for the back-up?

When your system crashes in the middle of an edit you won't lose anything that is FCPX related, if that's what you mean.

TM doesn't use more resources than CCC, but when you backup a drive while you are working on it (FCPX also uses your system drive while editing for creating temp files, for handling any open applications etc...) you may experience less performance. The more since your TM backups are located on a partition of your media drive. When your TM is backing up your system drive it writes files to that partition, and if at the same time you are working with media located on the other partition of that drive this will definitely affect the performance of the drive. So yes, I would advise to have TM turned off while you are editing.

- Ronny

I'm hearing what you're saying & I trust that it's correct. Sounds like FCPX saves your work if the application freezes/crashes. However I'm just struggling to understand how anything on the system drive is safe if it crashes (how does the application have the ability to save if the drive fails)?

If the drive itself actually fails, that is a bad scenario and there may be little you can do aside from using a drive utility of sorts to recover lost data and there is no guarantee that works 100%. A system OS crash is far less likely to wipe your media. Maybe you can try a spotlight search for Original Media and see if it can be located somewhere.

Sorry the last part of that post was intended for another thread

If your system drive fails you can always restore your work from the timed Library backups that you can keep on any drive.

Go to Final Cut Pro > Preferences > General and make sure Library backups is turned on. This defaults to storing backups in your Home directory. You can specify another location from the pop-up menu. With this option on, FCPX creates a database backup of your Libraries every 15 minutes. This backup also includes backups for every project and event database contained in that library. It does not backup media.

To restore a Library from a backup: In the Libraries list, select the library you want to restore and choose File > Open Library > From Backup. In the “Restore from” popup menu, select the backup date and time you want to restore from. Or, click Other, to select a different backup file. This backup file is added as a library in the Libraries list.

- Ronny

Team FCPX 10.1:

Could use a little help/advice as I gingerly update projects and events to 10.1.

A number of my projects use media from events on multiple drives. So let's say project "Sunshine v2" uses interviews and brill from my LaCie Quadra on two events but also uses broll from 3 events on my older OWC Raid.

Now there are also projects not the LaCie that use media from the the Lacie.

What should my approach be?

I don't want to copy all of the media from one drive to the next (waste of space) but if I update ""Sunshine v2" FCPX wants me to update the event on the OWC Raid.

A little confusing. Thoughts? Advice? Step by step instructions? Thanks as always.