Premiere Pro eating hardrive

[James Johanson]

I understand when you capture footage it takes a huge amount of space; however, when i begin to edit my dvcam footage, and render the files its eating an abnormal amount of my hardrive, is there any way to shorten the size of the files?

[Denis Danatzko]

but I think I'm at least in the ballpark. I suspect others here are certainly knowledgeable enough to confirm or contradict me.

Performance is affected by a number of things: how much RAM your machine has, how many hard drives, where are your temp and/or work files being written, and what kind of video card do you have? There are probably other considerations, but I believe these are the items that would most likely produce the conditions you describe.

[Matthew Jackson]

hey James, what do you mean by "render the files"?

When you start doing video editing, you need to start thinking in terms of GB's not MB's.... before my filmmaking career began, I was deep into graphics and architectural projects, and a big project may have pushed a gig... but video is a whole different story...

at least for me... 1 hour of film from my Xl2 = 15 GB +-, now others might chime in and tell you something different, but that's how you need to start thinking....

right now to manage my projects... I have a 500GB for 1 movie, a 300GB for daily client projects, and a 250 GB for other misc. projects... then for my C: drive I have an 80GB just to run my programs and windows, and a 40GB that I use for mp3's and crap... then I have a hot swap drive with 4 200GB hard drives, that are for storage..... that's a lot, but that's how it is...at least on my pc with the amount of stuff that I'm doing, and I film every day from 7-5...

Hopefully, someone way smarter than me will chime in, and teach us both something, but that's me... I'm running an AMD 64 Dual... with all the trimmings... premiere pro 1.5, after effects... etc....

cheers man!

[Shawn McCalip]

Originally Posted by James Johanson

...when i begin to edit my dvcam footage, and render the files its eating an abnormal amount of my hardrive, is there any way to shorten the size of the files?

There are a few things going on in Premiere here...

First, you capture your footage, which is usually saved in AVI format in DV compression- unless you have your capture settings set to something else.

Once you capture the footage, Premiere converts the audio into its own format. Any other sounds that you import (wavs, mp3s, etc.) will also be converted to Premiere's proprietary "Conformed Audio" files. This will show up in your project folder as a new folder called "Conformed Audio files".

Premiere uses non-destructive editing as well, which is why you'll see the red bar appear above your timeline when you apply an effect or transition to your video clips. Basically, when you apply an effect and render a preview, Premiere creates a copy of your original video clip and applies the effect to the copy. You can see these files in another new folder in your project folder called "Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files" (or if you're using PPro2, I think they show up as "Adobe Media Files" or something like that).

Premiere will create multiples of these preview files depending on how many times you've rendered previews with different effects, how many clips you have in your timeline, how many transitions you're using, levels of undo, etc. I'm not sure how or what codec it uses when creating a preview though. I would assume it would just render the footage uncompressed, to maintain quality.

As far as reducing these file sizes, there's really nothing you can do while working on that particular project. You can avoid creating previews all together, but unless you have a good system that can handle multiple layers of realtime rendering, its impractical. The other option is to wait until you're done with that particular project. Once everything is done, your client is happy, and you don't have to look at it again, try this: Go into your project folder and delete the folders named "Conformed Audio Files" and "Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files". By deleting these, you'll lose all your previews, and if you open up the project again, you'll have to wait for your machine to create a new set of previews... But it can save you anywhere from a few megabytes to several gigabytes. Just make sure you DON'T delete the raw footage or anything else in that folder!

I would suggest to plan for the creation of these files before you start ingesting video on to your system. Personally, I'd recommend that you're working on a drive with at least 2X more space than the sum of all your footage. So, if you're ingesting 10GB worth of footage, count on your total project size being at least 20GB...

Hopefully this all makes sense. Best of luck to you!