Moving the Adobe Premiere Elements files safely to another drive

[Thorusofer]

How do you safely move all of the Adobe Premiere Elements files, and I do mean EVERYTHING, from one drive to another without corrupting anything? How do I get it to install on another drive in the first? And most importantly, how do I get it to store the files from projects I'm currently editing on my HDD instead of my very low capacity SSD? I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements 15 and I've noticed that when I put a file into the timeline, space on my SSD temporarily goes down, and when it fills it up completely the audio will just vanish from the video and won't show up even if the video is rendered. I hope that I can get some help with this.

[Steve Grisetti]

Are you just looking to archive your projects and their media or are you moving a project-in-progress to a new drive?

The program itself should remain on your main C drive, of course. But keeping your project and media files on a second hard drive is pretty standard video editing technique. So I highly recommend you do that.

It sounds like you're using an external drive as your second drive. Depending on how fast your computer is, that can cause a bit of bottleneck at the USB, but most fairly powerful computers can do it without a hiccup.

Moving a project-in-progress gets a little trickier, since the program will need to re-link to all of the files. But if you move all of your media files into the same directory folder on your new drive, the program will usually prompt you to locate one of the files and, once you do, it will "see" the other files and re-link them to your project automatically.

[Thorusofer]

The main problem is when I'm editing and I first put a video in the timeline, it seems to kind of buffer the video and audio in a way? It starts to take up space temporarily as I said before, quickly eating through the little space I have left on my SSD. If there isn't enough space left on my SSD at the time I put the video in my timeline, the audio will not work at all. I would rather it not remain on the C drive because of how much space the program takes up and how little space on my SSD I actually have. I've had to uninstall multiple programs just to edit one video, its really ridiculous at this point. As a result, I would rather it be moved to my internal HDD. Since I make gaming videos, typically I finish those up quickly, so I don't end up saving them often or at all manually. I'm not using an external drive for that, my external is just for mass storage of finished videos to safely store them.

[Bill Sprague · Accepted solution]

Try this.....

Leave the Premiere Elements software on the SSD.

For each project, make a folder on the HDD. 

Open a new project and make sure it is being saved in the new project folder.

Go to Edit>Preferences>Scratch Disks and select "Same as Project" for everything.

When you are done and have a completed final video, you can delete the whole folder return space to the HDD, copy that folder to an external for future use or use the archival tools in the File menu.

That should ensure your crowded SSD is not used for the large files involved in making the project.

[Thorusofer]

That is what I needed, it was the Media Cache that was on the SSD still, everything else was going to the HDD. You sir are a god send and an amazing human being. I didn't know there was a way to actually do that in Premiere Elements itself, I thought you had to manually move a folder or something to do that.

[Bill Sprague]

Thorusofer  wrote

.... You sir are a god send and an amazing human being.....

I don't know that I would go that far.   I am one of about a half dozen "regulars" that keep an eye on this forum.  The others know a lot more than I do, but sometimes I get lucky!  Usually I learn something from finding an answer to someone's issue. 

Enjoy your video projects!

Bill

[Thorusofer]

Still, you gave me the right answer either way. Thanks again, keep being awesome!