Project Files - How big is too big?

I was just wondering how big everyone lets there project files get?

I've started subdividing my project because its taking awhile for them to load, it was getting over 10meg, now in two 5 Mb files, both regularly backed up off drive. I will recombine only the necessary sequences when i'm done and finesse from there. Any thoughts, suggestions, recommendations??

also, i just discoved opt-v pastes attributes, very happy about that...

I'm working on a feature and my project is 86mb. I also have another project of some new clips at 5mb and the sound effects in another at 20mb. And I frequently have them all open at the same time it doesn't seem to have any problems. It does take a while to load up but if you spilt them it's about the same time.

We had a long time AVID editor working on an episode and that project get to about 285MB before it began to be really problematic. It was slow to load and everything before that but at that size it became unstable and it took me 3 or 4 hours of opening and crashing and BBOD watching before I was able to get the project down to two or three smaller projects.

I keep all my sequence projects under 80MB and let my source projects creep up to 150MB. I have my projects arranged so that the source project doesn't need saving and I actually work with Autosave off (the Horror!) and have trained my command-I fingers to respond to seeing a good scene go by after a bunch of hacking. I don't recommend this unless you are prepared for it.

Keep your project size down, especially if you have less than 2GIG Ram in your system.
We have 4.5 which exceeds the maximum that FCP can address while leaving extra for other applications.

ak

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

OK well ive had some issues before with project files getting all weird at only 20meg or so, working with lots and lots of Motion projects specifically, and that seemed to slow everything down. . THe source project is pretty big but since i don;t deal with that much anymore i;ve let it go. Anyway, i decided to chop this project a little bit early and just wanted to hear others experiences. Good to know...

=S=