Advice on best way to set up 500 GB external hard-drive - scratch & back-up

Hi all -
I would like to get some advice on how to best set up my new 500GB external hard drive. I do lots of video editing, so my primary use for it is as a scratch disc. However, i like to have a back-up clone for emergencies so in the past I have always had a partitioned external. One for back up, one for media. Now that Leopard has the time machine feature, i have read that some people like to use one volume on their external for TM and the other for a bootable clone (using Carbon Copy cloner). Doing this will take up a lot of space on my hard drive and I really need it for media storage. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to set this up? If I had a clone on one volume, could i then put Time Machine on my Media volume and call it a day?
Thanks so much for any feedback!
Karen

You've essentially said that you're concerned about not having enough disk space for everything you do. I suggest a 2nd drive, as there is no partitioning scheme that's going to create more space for you. I'd set up one drive with 2 partitions - a bootable partition and a partition for TM. I'd dedicate the second drive to media. I wouldn't put TM and media on the same partition; in time <grin>, Time Machine will fill the partition.
And by the way, imho you should turn TM off anytime you are capturing, rendering or exporting; you don't want it using system resources (CPU, RAM or I/O) while you're doing those tasks.

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