
For massive projects, spread media across multiple drives so that the file sharing load is spread reasonably evenly across all your storage devices.
For bigger projects, keep each project on its own hard drive. For small projects, store media in a single folder containing folders from each camera card. This isn’t a problem, Premiere will find your media, regardless of where it is stored. If you are doing a feature film, documentary or reality program, your media storage requirements will be so large that they will probably spill over into multiple hard drives. My media folders are separated by client, then project. On my system, I have one folder that holds all my Premiere projects and separate folders that hold media. In a few questions, I’ll provide a naming convention for those folders. Then, create a folder inside it for each card that you shoot. Then, copy the entire contents of the camera card – even the files and folders you don’t understand or think you’ll need – into that folder.Īll too often, copying only a portion of a camera card means that media that Premiere needs for editing is not copied, which causes problems later.įor example, create a master folder for your project. I’m not saying it won’t work, but I am saying it is not a good idea and will often cause problems.Īssuming you are working with digital files, rather than video tape, I recommend that you create a new folder on your hard disk for each camera card. This rules out storing media that you want to use for editing on:įireWire 800 drives are fast enough for standard definition media however, FireWire technology is not recommended for editing HD or higher resolution. However, in order to edit your media successfully – without errors or dropped frames – you want to store media on your fastest storage device. (Though, to be precise, we should call the original files created by your camera as “source media.”)
While your final exported movie could be considered “media,” in most situations we use media to refer to source files, not finished files. Elements created entirely within Premiere, such as titles or effects.
Scratch, cache or temporary files created by Premiere during editing operations.Media is generally not considered to include: I define media as the source audio and visual elements which are created outside of Adobe Premiere, which you then import and combine to create a finished film or video. Feel free to add your thoughts in the Comments. And, based on my email, finding understandable answers is not easy.īecause of this I decided share my recommendations via a Q&A format. Very few things puzzle new editors more than media management.