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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Working from another drive to speed up Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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All right, this video we're going to talk about storing all your files on a separate hard drive, I know, wait, you might not have one, but listen to this video and decide whether it's right for you. It can be, probably other than proxies, it's going to be the biggest workflow update, that I found in my experience, to make things work faster. 

Even if you've not got a, like if you've got a slower computer and it's full up, it's going to be amazing, even if you've got a pretty good computer like I do. It is worth it, it makes everything run, and preview, and render a lot faster, and I promise we will get onto some more exciting Premiere Pro features soon. 

I feel like productivity is all about getting our system working fast, and our workflow nice, before we start jumping into the stressful parts of our kind of super features, I totally should have started with something a little sexier than proxies and media cache. Anyway, let's move on. 

Now keeping all of your files on a second hard drive, if you've got like, say a desktop style computer, either Mac or PC, often you can put an extra hard drive in it, which is good. If you're like me, working on a laptop, there's no room for an extra hard drive. So I'm using an external hard drive, and as long as it's fast enough, it works nearly as good.

So just make sure, when you are picking a hard drive, that you're going to shift this on to, it needs to be super fast. I'm going to give you my recommendations for today, with my knowledge. I'm not a hard drive expert, but you need to-- it needs to be an SSD, which is a Solid State Drive, but who knows, next year there might be, I don't know, a floppy state drive, I don't know, but just have a research about what the best speeds are for your particular computer, and your operating system. 

So at the moment SSD with the USBC, or if you go to Mac, Thunderbolt 3 is super fast. So PC, you're probably at USBC 3 point something at the moment, so just find a nice fast hard drive, doesn't have to be huge, just has to be fast, and what goes over there? So I find everything over there is great, even like the project file, doesn't have to be, and the trick is, just leaving your hard drive to only run Premiere Pro. 

So everything, like your project files, your source files, which is like the videos and audios you're using, should be on this extra hard drive, or the media cache, which we talked about in the last video, and your scratch disk, or on this external hard drive, the second hard drive. That frees up your kind of the hard drive, that came with your computer, to only run Premiere Pro, and that sort of balance works really well. 

So for your project file, to get it over there, it's easy, just 'File', 'Save As', and put it onto your external hard drive, and just use that as the way you're working. Same with all the raw files or the exercise files that we've got today, just move them onto that other hard drive. In terms of the scratch disk and media cache, they're pretty easy to change as well, so let's do that. I'll show you kind of a work through. 

So again, let's get to that media cache, on a Mac it's 'Premiere Pro', 'Preferences', 'Media Cache'. Remember, on a PC it's under, 'Edit', 'Preferences', 'Media Cache', and all you do is, say both of these places, you want both the cache files and the database to be on the external drive. So let's go to 'Browse', let's find my external drive. I've got a fresh one for you, I'm going to make-- this one's going to be my media cache, media cache, it's a hard word to spell, is it? I don't know, it is for me. Let's click it in there, and that's it. 

We'll do the same thing for here. It's going to go to the right place, and it just means-- it's going to say, "Hey, I've already got some media cache for this open document, do you want to remove it, or delete it?" Let's delete it, start fresh. 

The cool thing about this is that from now on, it will always be over there, obviously there is a trouble when you are out and about, you can't work on your file, unless you bring your external hard drive with you. So there are some compromises, but I do my video editing at home, plugged in, I do bits of editing out and about, and I just got to remember to take my hard drive with me. So there might be some projects that end up living on your hard drive, your main hard drive, and some that end up on the external drive, because it is a lot faster working. Let's click 'OK'. 

In terms of the scratch disks, remember those other files, like the render in and outs, you can put those over there as well, and they are great over there. To move them, they are slightly different, they are in your project settings, because scratch disks are set per project, because they kind of follow along the project file. Remember, they're kind of here, where are they? Gone. So these scratch disks follow along, often where the Premiere Pro project file is. So this is a bit of a pain, you've got to remember, every single time you set up a new project, to make sure the scratch disks are set up to that external drive. For me, I've already got this set up.

So how do I do that? I go to 'File', I go to 'Project Settings', and I go to 'Scratch Disks', and I can say, I want you to be over on my Lacie drive, and I'm going to make a new folder called Scratch Disk, and it's going to go in there, and you go browse. It just remembers the last place you went, and it's going to rebuild all those preview files. You can see, it's already building them. 

You do that, and now every time I do a render, render in and out, it will end up on that external drive, leaving the internal hard drive, to run Premiere Pro in my external drive, as long as it's nice and fast to do the data transfer, between the software and the actual physical files, as physical as files can get. We did that for an existing file, for new files, as part of your workflow. So if you've got a new project, you'll find it there, scratch disks, looks the same, just you can see that it's already browsed out to my scratch disk. So it remembers the last thing I did. 

All right, so that's it, you don't have to have an external drive or a separate drive, but if you do, keep your project files, your source files, your media cache and your scratch disk on them, and let your kind of internal hard drive run Premiere Pro, and it's a great little workflow. All right, on to the next video. "I hope it's more exciting than Disk Cache, Dan."