Operation Manual

111
Importing footage
Last updated 12/16/2014
• Specify your fastest hard disks for capturing footage and storing scratch files. You can use a slower disk for audio
preview files and the project file.
• Specify only disks attached to your computer. A hard disk located on a network is usually too slow. Avoid using
removable media because Premiere Pro always requires access to scratch disk files. Scratch disk files are preserved
for each project, even when you close the project. They are reused when you reopen the project associated with
them. If scratch disk files are stored on removable media and the media are removed from the drive, the scratch disk
is not available to Premiere Pro.
• You can divide a single disk into partitions and set up partitions as scratch disks. However, partioning doesn’t
improve performance because the single drive mechanism becomes a bottleneck. For best results, set up scratch disk
volumes that are physically separate drives.
• You can capture audio and video to separate drives, if supported by the format codec. (The native DV and HDV
capture in Premiere Pro does not support capturing audio separate from video.) Set the locations for new files by
choosing Edit > Preferences > Scratch Disks (Windows) or Premiere Pro > Preferences > Scratch Disks (Mac OS).
If you don’t change the defaults, all files captured or created by Premiere Pro are stored in the same folder in which
it stores the project files.
Online resources for improving system performance
See this forum thread for advice from experienced users on setting up disks for a video editing system.
For a collection of videos and articles about making Premiere Pro work faster can be found on this blog post.
See this video to learn about hard disk setup for optimum performance in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
To learn how to format a disk as NTFS on Windows, see this web page on the Microsoft site.
To learn how to format a disk as HFS+ on Mac OS, see this page from the kenstone.net website. The information on
this page is valid for Mac OS X 10.4-10.7
Move or clean the Media Cache Database
When Premiere Pro imports video and audio in some formats, it processes and caches versions of these items that it
can readily access when generating previews. Imported audio files are each conformed to a new .cfa file, and MPEG
files are indexed to a new .mpgindex file. The media cache greatly improves performance for previews, because the
video and audio items do not need to be reprocessed for each preview.
Note: When you first import a file, you may experience a delay while the media is being processed and cached.
A database retains links to each of the cached media files. This media cache database is shared with Adobe Media
Encoder, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Audition, so each of these applications can each read from and write to the
same set of cached media files. If you change the location of the database from within any of these applications, the
location is updated for the other applications, too. Each application can use its own cache folder, but the same database
keeps track of them.
❖ Choose Edit > Preferences > Media (Windows) or Premiere Pro > Preferences > Media (Mac OS), and do one of the
following:
• To move the media cache or the media cache database, click the respective Browse, button.
• To remove conformed and indexed files from the cache and to remove their entries from the database, click
Clean. This command only removes files associated with footage items for which the source file is no longer
available.