Mysteriously Shrinking Hard drive???

Rick Meyer

Rick Meyer

Veteran
I'm working on a project with Premiere Pro. Thing is, I have a lot of hard drive space, but this project is using most al of it. I have a 120gig internal hard drive. Also, a 72gig, internal hard drive, in a raid. And, 80gigs in an external hard drive.

I haven't been bringing in more files. I have just been working on what I have and saving repeatedly. However each hard drive has about 3-4 gigs of space left. This is critically low. And, I find myself, every now and again, having to waste a LOT of time doing a space consolidation dance. I'll find what I can delete. Or, I move something over to another drive, etc. Every now and again, I will receive a "your space is critically low" error. Then, I will check the hard drives and my C drive for example, will go from having 4 gigs left to have 500megs left and I'm not bringing anything into it. I can't figure out whats going on.

I am constantly saving, but that doesn't take up space. But, I am RENDERING MY WORK AREA, all the time. Might this have something to do with it? Would I be better RENDERING MY WORK AREA less frequently? I didn't think that rendering the work area would compile footage into a folder or anything but I cannot explain the diminishing hard drive space. I want to move things around, but I am limited as to what I can move and what I should move. Conformed Audio? Why is this taking up so much space? And can I delete that or is this a considered necessary link to my project? I have one Conformed Audio file that is 34gigs. When I tried to delete it, it warned me that it was being used by a program. So, I didn't do it.

Anyone else have this problem? Any one happen to know of a fix for this? Or can anyone suggest and idea as to how to stop the mysterious shrinking hard drive space???

Thanks!
Rick
 
I usually leave my self double teh amount of space the raw files take up for editing. If I am editing an hours worth of footage 14 gigs roughly then i leave myslef 28 gigs. Rendered files are basically the same as if you exported a clip yourslef as a dv avi or whatever codec you are using in your project. You can try to save the rendering for the end and you can constantly delte your rendered files once you have seen that the changes you made ot the clips are ok. Nothing you can really do about the audio conforming (if you dlete those files then your audio wil just conform again. try upgrading your hard drive if you can if not work on your project in sections (back up to tape etc..)
 
Your hard drives re storing the temporary render files created in Premiere Pro. that's where your space is going.
 
Not only does rendering use up disk space, but it also slows the program down if you need to make any changes. My suggestion is to delete all your rendered files. Render as little as possible - only to see what certain effects look like.
 
Man, thanks for the feedback. So, let me get this straight. I understand that when I purposely render a file, to export an AVI, that will eat up space. Obviously. But what you are saying is that when I make a change to my timeline, whether it be an effect or transition, etc. and I do a quick RENDER THE WORKSPACE to rid the timeline of that RED LINE, that rendered bit gets saved to a folder? Because I've spotted these files before, I was just too chicken to delete them. So, if this is the case, I will be able to go ahead and delete?

And as for the Conformed Audio, I understand that PREMIERE re-conforms the audio as soon as you open up the program (please correct me if I'm wrong). However, because my conformed AUDIO folders are so BIG (30gigs sometimes), I would imagine that is the conformed AUDIO from the entire history of the project. Meaning, the new conform will only pertain to what I am about to output to DVD. Because I am at the very last final stages of this project and I am still playing that damn musical hard drives game. Moving things over here. Trying to delete things there. ugh.

Thanks again for the feedback guys (and gals). I'll check back on this thread in a little bit!

Rick
 
Yes, if the red line turns green, then you've saved something to your disk. If you had audio effects, then it also rendered the audio. If you're short on disk space, then just use the "delete rendered files" function and live with the red lines until your project is done.
 
Just a note - you do not really have a lot of hard drive capacity in your machine in the video editing world. ( 120 + 72 + 80). That would be about the bare minimum required to do anything much and hopefully you have that all configured well and properly (eg scratch disks and system disk separation)
 
I've had the exact same problem

I've had the exact same problem

Here's what I found. Premiere Pro automatically makes a folder titled "Premiere Pro Preview Files" Whenever You render your work. This is so that you can see your video without extracting it. I was doing the same thing you seem to be doing and I ended up with a 9+ gig folder of multiple sample renders. Non of them where needed as they where out dated by the following render.
My suggestion is to delete these after you watch them or do as I now do and extract the video rather than rendering your work area to sample your editing.
 
Biilzebub said:
Here's what I found. Premiere Pro automatically makes a folder titled "Premiere Pro Preview Files" Whenever You render your work. This is so that you can see your video without extracting it. I was doing the same thing you seem to be doing and I ended up with a 9+ gig folder of multiple sample renders. Non of them where needed as they where out dated by the following render.
My suggestion is to delete these after you watch them or do as I now do and extract the video rather than rendering your work area to sample your editing.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the advice. Shooter...you are right! I need to get more hard drive space!
 
usually when i do work, i don't know if you want to do this, but what i do is set up a seperate like 100 gig hard drive to render all my files to. Then after each project i take the files, compress them and put them on a hard drive and put it on your shelf and then just clear your render hard drive, the benefit of this is if you have a very imporant project, it can be put back together with the render files, if the project file gets a virus or is lost, and it can be put back together on sepeate computers
 
I think your workflow is a little backwards here...In order to rebuild a project for later use you need to have the project file (thats why you want to make sure you set premiere ot autosave your project files every 5 minutes in an archive. Rendered can be reinported, yes, but if you save the project file and log your tapes and save them then you can always rebuild your project and rerender the render files again as long as the footage you have in your timline wasn;t an export of a previous timeline (meaning the footage is all clips that can be found using timecode on tape.) this is one of the reasons its so important to lay black on mini-dv tapes (so you wont have broken time-code) If you dont have a project file and EDL is the next best thing Also I dont believe you will actually be saving space by compressing your render files or any video files for that matter to a zip file ( I am assuming this is what you were talking about) It wont allow that type of data to be compressed any further.
 
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