Workflows and setup

Optimizing scratch disk performance

For optimum performance, follow these guidelines:

•If your computer has only one hard disk, consider leaving all scratch disk options at their default settings.

•Set up scratch disks on one or more separate hard disks. In Premiere Pro, you can set up a separate scratch disk for each type of media. For example, you can set up one disk for captured video and another for captured audio.

•On Windows, specify only partitions formatted for the NTFS file format as scratch disks. On Mac OS, use partitions formatted for Mac OS Extended. FAT32 partitions are not recommended for video. They do not support large file sizes.

Note: Third-party tools are available that allow NTFS drives to work with Mac OS. See Tuxera NTFS for Mac, and Paragon NTFS for Mac.

•On Mac OS, disable journaling for best performance.

•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.

Last updated 1/16/2012

Workflows and setup

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, Encore, and Soundbooth, 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.

Important: Before clicking the Clean button, make sure that any storage devices that contain your currently used source media are connected to your computer. If footage is determined to be missing because the storage device on which it is located is not connected, the associated files in the media cache is removed. This removal results in the need to reconform or reindex the footage when you attempt to use the footage later.

Cleaning the database and cache with the Clean button does not remove files that are associated with footage items for which the source files are still available. To manually remove conformed files and index files, navigate to the media cache folder and delete the files.

Optimize rendering for available memory

By default, Premiere Pro renders video using the maximum number of available processors, up to 16. However, some sequences, such as those containing high-resolution source video or still images, require large amounts of memory for the simultaneous rendering of multiple frames. These sequences can force Premiere Pro to cancel rendering and to give a Low Memory Warning alert. In these cases, you can maximize the available memory by changing the rendering optimization preference from Performance to Memory. Change this preference back to Performance when rendering no longer requires memory optimization.

1Select Edit > Preferences, and select Memory in the Preferences dialog box.

2In the drop-down list next to Optimize Rendering For, select Memory.

3Click OK, close Premiere Pro, and reopen the project for the new preference to take effect.

More Help topics

“Memory preferences” on page 19

“Render audio when rendering video” on page 206

Last updated 1/16/2012