Scratch disc - which one?

[Bjørn Sørensen]

I would like to bring with me my complete FCP project on a portable drive and continue working with my mac book pro at home. Then connect the portable drive to my office mac the next day and copy all data to the main HD and continue editing on the office mac.

I remember reading that it's best to set the scratch disc to a seperate drive rather than using the same drive for both media files and scratch disc.

But if I want to move my project between 2 computers, I need to use the portable drive for scratch disk as well... (?)

What is the solution here ?

[Edward Carlson]

I think you're a bit confused. The scratch disk is the disk that contains all your media. I would set your portable hard drive as the scratch disk on your home computer and save both your media and project files to it (with a backup of the project somewhere else, of course.) Then when you get to the office, just plug in your external and open your project. No need to copy media, it will all be there, ready to edit.

[William Hohauser]

That's good advice. And I would like to add that you should use a program like "File Synchronization" (File Synchronization) to backup to a cheap USB2 external drive, Or you can use the same program and the same cheap external drive to update the two computers if you choose to have the scratch disks reside on the individual computers instead of an external drive.

[Bjørn Sørensen]

Thank you both for your advices.
Bjorn

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by Edward Carlson

I think you're a bit confused. The scratch disk is the disk that contains all your media.

That's not entirely true. Take a look at the screen-grab of FCP's System Settings. Notice the tab says "disks", plural, not just one. And you have the option to capture audio and video to separate locations.

In fact, your "media" files can live *anywhere*, not just on the assigned scratch disk/s. Depending on how any system is setup media files could very well live on the main OS drive, it could be another internal, any various forms of external locations etc. And the "scratch disk" can and often is completely separate from where the core media lives so that you avoid the tons of fragmentations that occur from all the cache files that by default share the same space as the scratch disk.

Take a look at this "how to page" on how to setup any system for video editing, as it describes how to allocate your drives and where to put all your file types for each edit system type:

Lumenosity Reviews & Workflows: Setting up your Computer for HD Video Editing

You can learn stuff exactly like this and tons more in a filmmakers workshop I'll be hosting next month here in Phoenix. Details to be posted soon.