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Serghios
Serghios
Known Participant
December 19, 2022
Question

Scratch Disk, am I doing it right?

  • December 19, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 853 views

Hi guys,
Lately I have been experiencing a sharp drop in performance in my work.

Before I could easily work with h265 in 4k without rendering in timeline, now even if they are rendered it struggles a lot.

I'm not sure but it seems to have gotten worse since the latest updates to the mac, or premiere.


The question is this, I don't know if I am setting the cache files right and what I should do.

 

I have a macbook pro m1 max with 64gb of ram and a 1tb of space.

The mac only hosts applications, so I have a good 700gb of free space.

 

Since the mac's disk is the fastest I thought of creating a "scratch disk" folder in the documents.

The mac's disk goes up to 5500 MB/s so I thought by putting the scratch disk folder there and all the video material to work with projects I temporarily put them in an external disk, an 8TB OWC express 4m2 where there are 4x2gb m2 ssd's in raid zero which reaches a speed of 2500 MB/s.

 

Then I have another OWC thunderbay with 4 regular disks also in raid 0 which reaches a speed of about 700 MB/s which would be my storage and backup disk.


How should I set up premiere to get as much speed as possible with this setup? I've gotten the idea of trying to move the scratch disk card to the same disk where the files are and leave the mac free.

 

Currently it looks like this:

 

MAC DISK: SCRATCH DISK AND OF COURSE THE APPLICATIONS

 

OWC express 4m2: VIDEO EDITING DISK WHERE I HOST THE FILES AND PROJECTS

 

OWC thunderbay: STORAGE AND BACKUP 

 

Any advice accepted.

Cheers

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

P
Community Expert
Phillip HarveyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 19, 2022

Doesn't seem like any issue with your scratch. You are working with the worst possible media for real-time playback that exists on the market right now. Absolutely the most complex possible thing for a computer to decode (H265/HEVC), at a high resolution, unknown framertate, unknown whether or not there are other issues like VFR (from a phone). Even with a nice setup you are asking for trouble working with that. It's a losing battle to try to out-hardware media or workflow issues. But that's my experience.

Serghios
SerghiosAuthor
Known Participant
December 19, 2022

Honestly with the new macs the h265s run a wonder, even 6k. The problem is when you start having the timeline full of clips, various stabilization, sequences and various corrections. Then there is when I feel the slowdown.
Anyway, once it's rendered to the timeline it should run smoothly, but it doesn't.
I'm still curious if I've set up the scratch disk folder right.

P
Community Expert
Phillip HarveyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 19, 2022

Seems wild to me, but if that's the experience you're having then enjoy it 🙂

 

You're saying that when you render the timeline it's not playing back smoothly? (Edit: Sorry I guess it's obvious that's what you're saying. Just confirming.)

 

What kind of video previews are you creating? All of the scratch disks you described sound fast enough to run most kinds of video previews that you could create. So to me it still sounds like it could be a source media issue. Where are these clips coming from?

 

Revisiting the HEVC/H265 thing. Are they variable framerate? What device are they coming from? DJI products are also notorious for their encoding. I've been doing this almost 20 years, and while DJI hasn't been around that whole time, I can tell you that any time I've ever used media from DJI the performance is extremely poor compared to even other unoptimized media of the same type. When they started implementing HEVC for 4k workflows it's now not uncommon to see hitching making its way into the final encodings. So if you're working with DJI media I'd also investigate that. Is it the playback that's having an issue? Or is it the video preview with hitching being encoded into it? Check the frame drop indicator in the Program Monitor.

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