Editing on the"C" main operating system drive
 

I have heard many people say not to edit on the main drive. Could someone tell me exactly why? What would be side effects? I have been doing it for sometime now with no problems. I am just curious. thanks. J

space for one thing-a system drive of say 80 to 120 gigs is more than enough to run just about any system but to CAPTURE video at 13gigs per hour then to render to another format be it AVI,WMV, MPEG which all take up room leaves very little space for error not to mention that rendering back to the drive that is running the computer really isn't the most efficant way to do things. Again it becomes a space issue and an issue of efficancy.
With HDDs both intrnal and external so inexpensive these days why not invest in another harddrive so as to preclude any possible problems you COULD have with only having the single or system drive.
I.E., I got a Maxtor 1 touch FW HDD-750gig-7200rpm-16mb cache for $300 on sale-the best part is it's portable and 750 gigs gives me enough room to do pretty much anything-and when plugged into my #1 desktop system I have close to 2 gigs of capture,render and storage for keeping Vegas and DVDA projects for a very long time which is especially helpful for some of my corp clients AND here's the big one, IF the system crashes you haven't lost all that RAW footage or any other parts of the job-only the software which although a PITA to do can be reinstalled.
Anyway that's my take on it-I'm sure others will have their side as well.

Don

Disk seeks lower performance significantly. Any read/write activity on the drive that's interuppted by another will cause two seeks, one to the new location, and one back to the original location. You might think that after you load your OS and application into memory (say, 3 GB), that all the disks attention will be turned toward your video. Unfortunately, Windows and other apps will do various reads and writes on the system drive (C). One may spend days tracking down all the little system utilities and applications that are the source of these seeks and stopping them.

In fact, if you're mixing multiple video streams, it's beneficial to have each stream on a separate drive.

Thanks for the information. I already had a second drive, but I was using it for storage of other things. thanks.

Should I just change the Paths of where vegas sends files or should I install vegas on the second HD?

You can just leave Vegas on your system drive - ideal would be a second drive for media and a third to render projects to. This avoids any drive trying to "wear two hats". I use the system drive for all programs, an internal 10,000 RPM drive for renders, and an external 300 gig for media.

While away from the studio, I can edit on my laptop using just it's internal and the media drive, but I've not tried to render anything on that setup; I imagine it'd be pretty slow unless I added a second external for the render.

HTH... Steve

Oops, almost forgot - yes, you can copy any existing project directories to the media drive, then open them from Vegas by browsing - the next time you open Vegas, it'll expect to see that drive and will load the last project (unless you've turned that off in preferences)

When you say you use the 10,000 RPM drive for Renders, do you mean you have your vegas installed on this drive? Or, can you have vegas installed on system drive and render on another..I know you can render "to" your media drive. thanks.j

Programs are left on the system drive-this is where they are set up , get to the regisitry etc. Leave that part alone. Send the capture,renders, projects to other drives.

For instance I have 2 drives strictly for capture, 1 drive for DVDA and Vegas Projects, 1 drive for intermediate renders, AVI,MPG,AC3, 1 drive for music and graphics and the system drive (another seperate drive) has my programs.
Do not install the software anywhere but where it is intended to go-the system drive.

Don

I second that. In addition, I'd recommend keeping away from small drives - if a drive is less than maybe 2/3 full, it's easier to defrag and faster to access (just a general observation, not documented by me other than "gut feel")

And yes, Vegas can put files wherever you want them without the program itself needing to be there too... Steve