If you want to read the entire series from the start, please follow these links:
Getting Started
I can't stress enough how important is it to be organized, and by organized I mean with your computer hard drives, SSD's, files, fonts and folders. How many times have you spent 10, 20 or 30 minutes looking for a background or an image you saved out to the "no-mans land" of a hard drive you have? Only to find out that you actually saved the file to your documents folder. Sound all to familiar? I know I've done it.
For graphic artists and video production folks, this happens all to often. Most of them have the best intentions of one day organizing and cleaning everything up, but that day seldom arrives due to tight project deadlines. So before you start down this same path, let me give you a few ideas to keep you organized right from the beginning.
Whether you're designing HD graphics or working with massive HD video files, how you setup your computer's hard drives is extremely important. Yes hard drive speeds are amazingly fast these days, but you will become painfully aware of how slow things get if you're trying to read and write to the same hard drive that is also being used as the swap drive. Building a system around one or two massive drives and partitioning them into smaller sections thinking your going to speed things up or save time and money, is a waste of time and money.
Computer and Drives -
First, you can't talk about getting organized without some sort of mention as to what kind of computer you have. Whatever that system might be, if it's over five years old, it's probably not good enough. If you're not using at least an i5 with 16 gigs of ram, it's time to build a new system. Yes you could certainly start out using a smaller setup, but rendering times for HD video will be through the roof. Graphics production wise, you may be ok though. What type of system you should have or build yourself, I'll save for another post.
Second, if you don't have a mother board that supports M.2, get one. What is M.2 you ask? For the technical explanation, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2 What all the technical mumbo jumbo means is pure, crazy, I want it now, speed. Your normal SATA 3 hard drive of today may spin at 7200 rpm and have a big cache, but its theoretical transfer buss speed is 6 gigs per second. And in reality, it's more like 4.8 gigs per second (which by the way, most hard drives can't reach but SSD's can). Granted that's fast, but not fast enough when you're booting up your computer or starting Vegas Pro. An M.2 drive gets the job done at 31.5 gigs per second. Now that's fast!!
I use the M.2 drive (really an SSD) as my C: drive. My OS and all my software is located on a 512 gig M.2 SSD. Why? Like I stated above, speed. I can start my i7, Win 10 Pro system to full Win 10 boot up in under 15 seconds, and that's with no tweaking the BIOS. Compare that to any standard SATA boot up time of over a minute and a half, if not longer. If I engage the tweaks on my BIOS, that time drops to 8 seconds. And loading software like Vegas Pro is just under 10 seconds, or Photoshop in under 6 seconds. Time is money and I hate waiting, so a mother board with an M.2 slot is the way to go.
Third is setting up your remaining SSD's and hard drives correctly. How I approach this is the way old video editing suites use to be set up. In the past, you had one video deck for A roll footage, another deck for B roll footage, yet another deck for C roll footage and a record deck. I do the same thing, only with SSD's and hard drives. My A, B and C roll "decks" are really three separate 512 gig SSD drives labeled Roll A, Roll B and Roll C. And since most of the time you don't have C roll footage, I use the Roll C drive as my Swap and Temp drive as well. My record "deck" drive is a 4 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm hard drive labeled Record. I also have two other hard drives, one 2 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Projects and Graphics and the other is an 8 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Video Storage.
Now if you've been keeping track, that's roughly 16 terabytes of storage available for whatever might come my way. Yes, it might seem like a bit of overkill, but I won't run out of space anytime soon and have to reorganize everything yet again in a few years because I didn't plan ahead. And yes, you could certainly drop the Roll C and the Video Storage drives and add them later if you're doing video production.
The above drive setup is great for video, but what if you're not going to do any video production and need a system for graphics? I would setup a system with a 512 gig SSD as my Swap and Temp drive. A 4 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Clients and 2 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Stock Graphics.
Organizing your hard drives -
So you have all these drives, now what? My Roll drives are set up exactly the same. Under each drive is the clients name and under each name is what project it's for. So it would look like:
Roll A: Client XYZ / Project 1
/ Project 2
/ Project 3
Roll A: Client QRS / Project 1
Roll B: Client XYZ / Project 1
/ Project 2
/ Project 3
Roll B: Client QRS / Project 1
And so on. Exactly the same on each Roll drive. Under each Project folder would be all the video footage from say Camera 1 for Roll A's drive and all the video footage from say Camera 2 for Roll B's drive and so on. Ok, so now I hear you saying, "But I only use one camera for shooting, so why do I need separate drives?" Almost everyone I've ever worked with shooting with a single camera also gets "B Roll" footage (if you're not doing this, you better start). It's basically a lot of extra camera shots you may or may not use in your final edit. So when you're transferring files from the camera to the hard drives, just separate the different footage files to the appropriate drive. This way when you're editing, you're pulling separate camera footage from separate drives, slightly speeding up the rendering process. It keeps everything neat and tidy as well. And yes, you could certainly get away with only using a single Roll A drive if you need to cut costs.
The Record drive is setup in a similar manner. You'd have the clients name and under that would be the project you're working on. All edits, whether they be test, proof or final would be under that project folder.
The Projects and Graphics drive holds on to just about everything else. Under this drive you'd have a folder labeled Clients, under that would be a Project folder, and under this would be all graphics, music, editing project file(s), etc. Each with their own folders. Also on the Projects and Graphics drive would be folders for Stock Footage, Stock Graphics, Stock Music, Sound Effects, etc. You get the idea....
Everything has its place. A location that you can find quickly and backup easily later on. This has saved me countless hours of searching through folders looking for this or that over the years. Not to mention speeding up rendering times! And it wasn't easy getting to this organized world. I had to go through years of clients, folders, pictures, music, sound effects, bla, bla, bla to get everything put in it's place. But it's paid off and made working on multiple projects at the same time much easier.
Getting Started
I can't stress enough how important is it to be organized, and by organized I mean with your computer hard drives, SSD's, files, fonts and folders. How many times have you spent 10, 20 or 30 minutes looking for a background or an image you saved out to the "no-mans land" of a hard drive you have? Only to find out that you actually saved the file to your documents folder. Sound all to familiar? I know I've done it.
For graphic artists and video production folks, this happens all to often. Most of them have the best intentions of one day organizing and cleaning everything up, but that day seldom arrives due to tight project deadlines. So before you start down this same path, let me give you a few ideas to keep you organized right from the beginning.
Whether you're designing HD graphics or working with massive HD video files, how you setup your computer's hard drives is extremely important. Yes hard drive speeds are amazingly fast these days, but you will become painfully aware of how slow things get if you're trying to read and write to the same hard drive that is also being used as the swap drive. Building a system around one or two massive drives and partitioning them into smaller sections thinking your going to speed things up or save time and money, is a waste of time and money.
Computer and Drives -
First, you can't talk about getting organized without some sort of mention as to what kind of computer you have. Whatever that system might be, if it's over five years old, it's probably not good enough. If you're not using at least an i5 with 16 gigs of ram, it's time to build a new system. Yes you could certainly start out using a smaller setup, but rendering times for HD video will be through the roof. Graphics production wise, you may be ok though. What type of system you should have or build yourself, I'll save for another post.
Second, if you don't have a mother board that supports M.2, get one. What is M.2 you ask? For the technical explanation, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2 What all the technical mumbo jumbo means is pure, crazy, I want it now, speed. Your normal SATA 3 hard drive of today may spin at 7200 rpm and have a big cache, but its theoretical transfer buss speed is 6 gigs per second. And in reality, it's more like 4.8 gigs per second (which by the way, most hard drives can't reach but SSD's can). Granted that's fast, but not fast enough when you're booting up your computer or starting Vegas Pro. An M.2 drive gets the job done at 31.5 gigs per second. Now that's fast!!
I use the M.2 drive (really an SSD) as my C: drive. My OS and all my software is located on a 512 gig M.2 SSD. Why? Like I stated above, speed. I can start my i7, Win 10 Pro system to full Win 10 boot up in under 15 seconds, and that's with no tweaking the BIOS. Compare that to any standard SATA boot up time of over a minute and a half, if not longer. If I engage the tweaks on my BIOS, that time drops to 8 seconds. And loading software like Vegas Pro is just under 10 seconds, or Photoshop in under 6 seconds. Time is money and I hate waiting, so a mother board with an M.2 slot is the way to go.
Third is setting up your remaining SSD's and hard drives correctly. How I approach this is the way old video editing suites use to be set up. In the past, you had one video deck for A roll footage, another deck for B roll footage, yet another deck for C roll footage and a record deck. I do the same thing, only with SSD's and hard drives. My A, B and C roll "decks" are really three separate 512 gig SSD drives labeled Roll A, Roll B and Roll C. And since most of the time you don't have C roll footage, I use the Roll C drive as my Swap and Temp drive as well. My record "deck" drive is a 4 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm hard drive labeled Record. I also have two other hard drives, one 2 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Projects and Graphics and the other is an 8 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Video Storage.
Now if you've been keeping track, that's roughly 16 terabytes of storage available for whatever might come my way. Yes, it might seem like a bit of overkill, but I won't run out of space anytime soon and have to reorganize everything yet again in a few years because I didn't plan ahead. And yes, you could certainly drop the Roll C and the Video Storage drives and add them later if you're doing video production.
The above drive setup is great for video, but what if you're not going to do any video production and need a system for graphics? I would setup a system with a 512 gig SSD as my Swap and Temp drive. A 4 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Clients and 2 terabyte SATA 3, 7200 rpm drive labeled Stock Graphics.
Organizing your hard drives -
So you have all these drives, now what? My Roll drives are set up exactly the same. Under each drive is the clients name and under each name is what project it's for. So it would look like:
Roll A: Client XYZ / Project 1
/ Project 2
/ Project 3
Roll A: Client QRS / Project 1
Roll B: Client XYZ / Project 1
/ Project 2
/ Project 3
Roll B: Client QRS / Project 1
And so on. Exactly the same on each Roll drive. Under each Project folder would be all the video footage from say Camera 1 for Roll A's drive and all the video footage from say Camera 2 for Roll B's drive and so on. Ok, so now I hear you saying, "But I only use one camera for shooting, so why do I need separate drives?" Almost everyone I've ever worked with shooting with a single camera also gets "B Roll" footage (if you're not doing this, you better start). It's basically a lot of extra camera shots you may or may not use in your final edit. So when you're transferring files from the camera to the hard drives, just separate the different footage files to the appropriate drive. This way when you're editing, you're pulling separate camera footage from separate drives, slightly speeding up the rendering process. It keeps everything neat and tidy as well. And yes, you could certainly get away with only using a single Roll A drive if you need to cut costs.
The Record drive is setup in a similar manner. You'd have the clients name and under that would be the project you're working on. All edits, whether they be test, proof or final would be under that project folder.
The Projects and Graphics drive holds on to just about everything else. Under this drive you'd have a folder labeled Clients, under that would be a Project folder, and under this would be all graphics, music, editing project file(s), etc. Each with their own folders. Also on the Projects and Graphics drive would be folders for Stock Footage, Stock Graphics, Stock Music, Sound Effects, etc. You get the idea....
Everything has its place. A location that you can find quickly and backup easily later on. This has saved me countless hours of searching through folders looking for this or that over the years. Not to mention speeding up rendering times! And it wasn't easy getting to this organized world. I had to go through years of clients, folders, pictures, music, sound effects, bla, bla, bla to get everything put in it's place. But it's paid off and made working on multiple projects at the same time much easier.