Does Premiere store footage somewhere temporarily to access it?

Question

I've been telling my students for years to always have the footage they're editing as close to the top of their local hard drive as possible. But with recent pushes for cloud storage i'm not sure i'm telling them the right thing anymore. We store footage for "longer" terms in a couple network drives we have access to. Is it still best practice for us to move that footage to our hard drive before editing or is Premiere going to store it locally anyway if we just access the footage and edit it over the network?

mattchristensen · Answer

@ChrisY1184977 I'm not sure what you mean by "top of their local hard drive". If you mean the highest up in the folder hierarchy of the file system, that doesn't matter. There's no relation between where in the file system the media is and how it performs in terms of playback in Premiere Pro. We don't care if it's at the root of the driver or 10 folders deep.

Regarding media stored on a network sever, no, Premiere Pro doesn't first copy the footage locally. The file data is read over the network and decoded into RAM as its needed for playback, but there is no intermediate step of storing it on the local drive.

The only reason you might prefer to move footage locally is if the network doesn't have the bandwidth to send the file data fast enough for Premiere Pro to play without stuttering. If the network is fast enough, then it makes no difference if the media lives on the network or locally.

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