Curious - why keep project files and media seperate?

I know that it's considered standard practice to keep media files on an external drive, and project files on the startup disc - but I just wonder what the technical reasons behind this are? is it simply just retaining them if the external crashes?
cheers
hugh

If your media drives fail, then your project is safe. I typically work from the project file on the system drive, then back it up nightly onto the media drive. This way I have two copies, in case my system drive fails. But I work with it from the system drive.
Shane

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Project files and Media files on same disk OK?

For some reason I have it in my head that having my project files on the same disk as I have the media files on is a bad idea.
Is that true? Thanks.

film418 wrote:
So, I'm pulling media from E,F and the two external drives and outputting to G drive. My specific question is whether having project files on the same disk (F) as read only media files is a bottleneck?
I haven't bothered separating this side of 2003 and haven't had any bottlenecks.. not from disk R/W anyway (CPU, memory.. another story). Unless you've got thousands of files and dozens of warp stabilisers in play your project file isn't going to be large enough to make a dent on disk access I reckon. A project file is, what.. 5 - 50 mb. That's a blip in the world of RED footage. Perhaps Adobe staff could reply on how intensively the project file is accessed during playback and editing?

Are "working copies", "project files" and "editing files" the same thing?

Hello.
I have just joined the Adobe Forums as a newbie starting right at the bottom. I am still unfamiliar with the terms "working copies", "project files" and "editing files".
I wonder if someone will help me to know the difference between these terms.
I have just started the Dreamweaver tutorial, "Creating your first website, Part 1: Set up your site and project files" (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_website_pt1.htm).
The tutorial read, "You've now defined a local site folder for the Check Magazine site. This is where you keep the working copies of web pages on your local computer.".
Are "working copies", "project files" and "editing files" the same thing?

Murray *ACP* wrote:
Why would the raid level make any difference at all? My data files are all stored on a RAID 4 system and seems to do pretty well.
Murray *ACP*,
If I may elaborate on this,
being completely new to Dreamweaver, my reason for having wondered whether it would be a good idea or a bad idea to have these files on disks that are in RAID 0, was because the term project files in the Dreamweaver Tutorial had me thinking of Premiere Pro project files and the performance increase working with such project files in a RAID 0 setup, which (provided there is backup) is especially beneficial if you have large or complex projects, long time-lines and a tight deadline,
especially considering that as fill rates of disks go up, and as the number of disk activities on a disk go up, performance goes down, sometimes by 50%, and that the more tracks you have in your project, the more strain is put on your disk, and the more applications you have open, the more your pagefile is used, especially on systems with limited memory.
Therefore, as RAID 0 offers the best performance increase over a single disk, I immediately thought of the concept of project files related to Premiere Pro when I came across the term project files in the Dreamweaver Tutorial, being unfamiliar with the definition of project files in Dreamweaver world, hence my need to define project files related to Dreamweaver with reference to disk setup and file management.
However, if I understand correctly, my conclusion is that RAID 0 is not necessary for Dreamweaver project files, since the local site is not disk intensive, unless you have a huge website to build ?
Also, if I understand correctly, in website design, you want to minimize local files and use your hosting company to store and retrieve info from ?

I moved the project files and now I can't get them back into iMovie 11

I was working on a project but I ran out of disk space before I could finish it. Now, for this very purpose, I have an external hard drive with plenty of space on it. So I tried moving the folder with all my project files onto the external hd, and now iMovie can't find my project anymore. With iMovie '06 it was as simple as hitting "save as" and saving the project to the external hd, but I guess that's not complicated enough for the new version. Now I can't get into my project. I even try clicking on the actual project file, and it goes to iMovie as if the project was about to open, but nothing happens. So I fear I wasted a lot of time working on that project only to have to start all over because I ran out of disk space.
Someone please tell me there's a way to get the project files open again. Thanks

enoughsaid3 wrote:
... my external disk isn't formatted as Mac OS extended (journaled). I don't know how to do this,...
that is a simple one and should be a routine after purchasing a new drive (in a Mac-only environment!):
• on your Mac, Apps/Utilities you'll find Disk 'Utility'
• on the left lane, you'll notice your connected hard drive(s)
• select it, click on the 'erase' tab
• NOTE: FORMATTING A DRIVE MEANS ERASING ALL CONTENT ON THAT DRIVE!
that's why you should do it as step#1 after purchasing a new drive
done ...-

Save project file and event file?

When archiving a project, should I save the project file and the event file? All of my raw footage is saved on it's origional media.
Cheers.
Tom

You want to save the Project folder contents and the contents of any Events used within the Project. You can also do this from the Project library itself by control clicking on the Project itself and selecting Duplicate Project. Make sure to attach an external drive for the archive.

Imovie, i can't see my project files and events, and won't make new ones!?

When opening imovie (11) i cant see eny off my events or project files and i cant make new ones or import files. But i still se my events and project if i go to User-Film-Imovie Projects/Events...!?
Message was edited by: Seb K S

I've been having problems along the lines of most of these people as I have been trying to move iMovie files from one computer to another. I then put them on a USB drive, only to find out that it wouldn't work, according to the documentation. We then bought another Firewire drive, and formatted it as forum notes indicated, HDF. It didn't work correctly for file transfer in FAT32. Then when the files were put on the new drive via command line file copying program called rsync.
I still couldn't get it to sync up on the new drive, but they were there. The answer turned out to be a few things found in much older posts, so I thought I'd post them here in case it is helpful to others.
I'm now using iMovie11, but some of these were written for 08.
*1. The files have to be in the two directories, Events and Projects. These have to be at the *top level of the hard drive*. If they are at a lower level, iMovie won't find them*. I had put them in another folder called Movies, but it can't find them there.
2. Throw out the preference file, if necessary, as noted in several of the online posts. I'm not sure if that mattered or not, but did it, as well as restarted iMovie and the newly added projects and events finally showed up.
3. Copy files to the events or project folder while holding down the command key.
It now looks like there is a little bit of an issue with the syncing of the project data and the movie, but so far, it seems to be o.k., other than that.

Have an older Macbook Pro 10.6.8 tried to update it to XMavericks. Discovered that my microsoft apps are not compatible. Can I keep my files and convert them?

Have an older Macbook Pro 10.6.8 tried to update it to XMavericks. Discovered that my microsoft apps are not compatible. Can I keep my files and convert them?

Use a product such as LibreOffice, the iWork applications, or Microsoft Office 2008 or newer to open them.
(107914)

When transferring data from an old hard drive to a new one, is there a way to keep alias files and folders in tact?

My mac and I rely HEAVILY on the use of alias files and folders. The simple version of my question is: When transferring data from an old hard drive to a new one, is there a way to keep alias files and folders in tact? These are not symlinks or symbolic links, they're all alias files and folders.
Is there any software out there that might help me with a solution? Are there any tricks or tips you can give me to try?

Use either Setup Assistant at first start, or Migration Assistant on subsequent occasions and all will be transferred intact. Given your wording I presume you are Unix savvy and will appreciate the problems that duplicate userids would cause, so of you use MA for the migration, make sure the target Mac has no userid equal to that on the source and you will be fine.
SA does not have these issues since it runs before any user account is created, so it can simply copy over everything. But MA runs after the fact and only solves the issue partially by changing the UID in the user directory, leading to permission problems.

Project file, and autosaves, hang when opening, even if media offline

Scary problem.
Earlier today I had an issue with Compressor, it repeated unexpectedly quit when trying to launch. So, I reinstalled it and ended up reinstalling from my FCS1 disc. I then realised I had reverted all my studio apps to their studio 1.0 versions, so then ran install from my FCS2 disc. This brought all apps back up to date and I succesfully ran software update.
All apps now launch without problems, except for one project file which hangs at 37% during the 'reading project' stage of opening it.
I'm pretty sure its not down to project file corruption as the same thing happens when I try and open any of the autosaves.
I've also taken all my media drives offline and tried but the same thing happens, but instead of hanging at 37% it hangs at 30%.
Final cut pro is semi-responsive when it hangs, menus open etc, but quit doesn't work and clicking cancel in the 'reading project' window doesn't work. Only way out is to force quit at this point.
I have also tried removing the /Users/<myaccount>/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data folder but that makes no difference.
Are there any files that could be lurking from doing the round trip back to an older version? Not sure why this would only be effecting one project file though. Other recent projects open fine.
Ever-so slightly desperate now! Hopefully someone can help. Many thanks.

Do you know whether it was built in CS5?
The Premiere project it is linked to must be CS5. (I think this is what I found when using CS3, CS4, and CS5 projects with Encore CS5.)
Try opening the PR project in Premiere, then while open, open the Encore project.

Keeping Project Files

Hi Gang
I understand that FC Project Files are best kept in your system drive? True?
At the moment I've been keeping many Project Files on external drives. Wonder if I should copy them over to a folder on my system drive?
Thank you
Mike

Here's why everyone adopted putting project files on the system drive. There's two locations you have material for an FCP project.
One is your Capture Scratch folder, which is big video files, everything FCP captures or transfers in. This must be on a second "Scratch Disk", due to the bandwidth needed for all the video/audio streams used during editing. Backup/archive needs to be a high volume media like DLT tape backups.
The second location is a Project folder, in which you'll make a folder for each of your projects individually. In each of those are any music or additional audio files, your FCP project file, photos, CGI, etc. This folder is much smaller can can be backed up to one or more CDs or DVDs.
To make the explanation easier for beginners, way back when, trainers adopted the explanation of; Capture Scratch goes on the Scratch Disk, Project folder on the OS drive. That's the only reason.
There is no technical reason why you should put that project folder anywhere. And since a good, regular backup of your data is necessary (especially if you do this for a living), I put it all on my media (Scratch) drive, and just back up that one drive on a regular basis.
My OS has a disk clone made of it (Carbon Copy Cloner), which I only update when new software is added or deleted. Rare that I have to do that.

Premiere Pro CS6 extreme project bloating and Media Encoder

Hi there,
I'm interested in hearing if others are having this issue and if there's a fix. I first noticed this bug in CS5 and it hasn't changed in CS6.0.1. An editor I'm working with recently discovered the problem at the expense of a project being usable the day before clients are coming in to work on cuts.
Here's what's happening: we have a 20MB commercial project, no warp stabilizer in play, no frequent "save as..." commands being used, both of which seem to contribute to project bloating based on some online research. I've been using Premiere as a finishing timeline since CS5 and noticed back then, when we were making some settings in Media Encoder, that when you click and drag sequences into ME instead of using the "Add Premiere Pro Sequence" menu option, the Premiere project file size quickly increases and saves and autosaves start taking several minutes to complete.
We've been using the "Add Premiere Pro Sequence" method to send things to ME on this project but the editor was getting impatient the amount of time it was taking for ME to load the project and get to the point where he could pick which sequences he wanted to encode. He did a bit of research and found the click and drag method to be faster. After a handful of times using this method, the project size went from 20MB to 3.71GB. Our autosave folder is set keep 5 versions of the project and you can see the project size doubling from 477MB to 840MB to 1.6GB.
I was able to import the 477MB project into a new project and save it out at its original size of 20MB. However, this meant that we lost about 90 minutes worth of work. I tried to import the 3.71GB file overnight and it had made no progress when I came in this AM.
Reading online, I found that the "Save As..." command had previously caused some kind of duplication of preview file links in the project code. I opened up our 20MB project in TextWrangler and compared it to the 840MB project's lines of code. The 20MB project had 400k lines and the 840MB project had about a million. The difference appeared to stem from links to Preview files. I wanted to try to clear those out to see if I could get the project size down but, probably because of the file size, TextWrangler crashed.
Is there any way to clean out the bloat from these projects without importing into a new project? Also, are there settings in Media Encoder or Premiere that will prevent the bloat from happening when using the click-drag method of getting sequences into ME? We're using the "Use Preview Files" option, which greatly speeds up the compression in ME, but might be contributing to the issue.
Here are the machine specs:
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz 12-core
16GB RAM
NVidia Quadro 4000
ATTO Fibrechannel card
Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme 2
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
Best,
Jon

Thank you for your response.
-I tried exporting an AVI and the file exported succesfully but with a warning "Adobe Media Encoder Could not write XMP data in output file." The file plays fine though and is over 5.5GB. So that's odd that my h.264 which is under 1GB won't fully export.
-Yes, the same thing happens when exporting directly from PrPro instead of using AME.
-In this project I am using NO Dynamic Links.
-I have not installed any codec libraries.
-I do not use 3rd party plug-ins.
-My destination drive has several terabytes.
Thanks,
Nate

FCS is only deleting my FCP project file and not linked assets. please help.

When deleting a FCP project from FCS it does not give me the option to delete all linked media. It only deletes the FCP project file leaving me to delete all related media manually. In the user guide it says it should give me the option to delete the project and all files automatically but this doesn't happen on our system. Does anyone know why? and how to turn this function on?

A bug that will never be fixed. You have to delete the associated assets manually.

How to keep project files small

I'm a veteran Windows and Adobe Premiere user, so I come to iMovie with that frame of reference. One thing that Premiere does that it doesn't seem that iMovie does is keep the video files separate from the project file. I captured 2 hours of a 8 mm video into iMovie. It was 24 GB. I want to create a DVD out of the entire 2 hours, but to practice, I wanted to work with only about 10 minutes of it. So I put a clip on the timeline, cut it down to 10 minutes, deleted all the clips from the clip window and saved it. The file size is 24 GB.
In Premiere, all source videos are in the format they were captured in. Within a project file, you point to the source video but it doesn't get saved with the project file. Therefore you can have lots of project files (all of which are small) but only one source video file.
Is there any way to have a second iMovie project point to another project and use it as a source? Or do you always have to save the source video file with the project file?
Thanks,
Mike

Hi Mike, welcome to the discussion!
do you always have to save the source video file with the project file?
Your observations are spot on. iMovie HD does not "share" source files. Each project has its own files that it stores in the Media folder inside the project. As video/audio is imported to the project -- from a camera or elsewhere -- it is copied directly to the project.
(The project is not a file. It is actually a package, a special kind of folder. To look inside the package, Control-click on the project icon and choose "Show Package Contents" from the popUp menu that appears. The source files are in the Media folder.)
iMovie HD does non-destructive editing -- Media files are never modified -- so projects tend to stay large. Emptying the iMovie trash may discard clips, but not necessarily reduce the size of the project.
It helps to know how things work. Understanding the iMovie trash is important.
Media files that support the clips are never modified. In your project, you have a single 120 minute Media file. If you discard 110 minutes of your project, emptying the trash does not reduce the size of the project because of non-destructive editing. iMovie ALWAYS lets you restore that 10 minute clip back to 2 hours -- even if you Copy and Paste the clip into a different project.
The Media file itself is discarded only when the LAST clip using that Media file is discarded. If no clip uses the file when you empty the trash, it is discarded.
(In an extreme situation like yours, one option is to export the 10-minute clip to its own file, then import that file back into the project. Now you can discard the 2 hour clip.)
Note that for a project like yours, iMovie 6 has a feature that helps minimize the impact of this feature. Instead of importing the video as a single 2 hour clip, there's an iMovie 6 preference to tell iMovie to break up the video in 1 minute scenes (or whatever duration you want.) In your case, discarding 110 1-minute clips would, in fact, remove them from the project. Each clip would be the sole clip using its Media file, so discarding a clip would discard its Media file too.
This scene preference can be useful for projects like yours where scene changes aren't automatically detected as the video is imported. On modern camcorders, iMovie optionally starts a new Media file -- a new clip -- at each scene break. Later, when you discard that clip, its Media file goes out with it.
As you Copy and Paste clips from one project to another, iMovie applies the same rules as importing. Copying a clip and Pasting it into another project copies its entire Media file to the project.
That happens each time you Copy and Paste a clip. It's important, therefore, to Copy and Paste all the clips you want at the same time. Then iMovie figures out which Media files need to be copied and copies each one just one time. Otherwise, if you Copy and Paste clips separately, iMovie may copy that Media file again.
Note that the Pasted clip inherits all the non-destructive features it has in the original project.
There's pros and cons to this whole approach, of course. One important pro is that you don't have to worry about accidentally discarding a video file in a central cache that the project relies on. Non-destructive editing also helps avoid corruption problems that plagued earlier versions of iMovie as Media files were modified.
Fortunately, as FireWire drives have become cheap the problem isn't so much of a problem when you think about it.
Karl

Colors and fonts different on 2 different macs,same project file and assets

my customer created a project in DVDSP on their Mac, I'm not sure the specs of the computer, but they do not have a dual-layer burner, so they gave me the project file along with all of the relevant media on an external firewire drive. I hooked up the drive to my Mac, opened up the project file, everything seemed to have linked up. After checking all of the buttons in simulator mode, I proceeded to do a "Build" successfully. Next I chose the layer break point, luckily there was one as an option, and did the Format/Burn. I gave the disk to the customer and they say that the colors are way off, and even some of the fonts. Now that the customer has the drive back, I asked them to do the "Build" on their computer and check the newly created Video TS folder in Mac's DVD player, they did so, and everything is now "good". I can kind of understand why fonts might be a problem, but why the colors? thanks for any help!

one reason why this happens is when the colour management settings in Colour Sync and the display profile you are using are different to your clients

Format different between project file and .chm

I just received a translated version of our help system. When
I open the project file, the numbered lines look as if they are all
the same format. However, when I view the topic in the project file
or in the .chm file, some of the numbered lines are indented. Does
anyone know why this is happening? I will appreciate any
information on this.

Have you checked that the same style is applied to all the
numbered lines? Go into the truecode and see what the difference is
between those that are indented and those that are not.

Curious - why keep project files and media seperate?

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