Hey all

So my producer asked me a question that i couldn't answer today...

Let's say you want to make a backup of all your source footage. So you start copying it all off to another external drive, and it says it will take 2 hours to do that.

But you wanna keep editing...

Is it a bad idea to be copying the footage and editing with the footage at the same time? Is there a risk of a bad copy? Any reason to not do it other than the drives might be kinda slow?

thanks!
greg

> Is it a bad idea to be copying the footage and editing with the footage at the same time? Is there
> a risk of a bad copy? Any reason to not do it other than the drives might be kinda slow?

I usually don't, but as long as you're not doing any writing to the files being copied at the time, it should be okay. Just don't copy your active project file at the same time. Personally, I think it's better form to copy the files after your session, and after you've backed up your project file safely. Then leave it overnight or over lunch/dinner to copy.


www.derekmok.com

The thing that a lot of users don't understand is that anything involving audio / video is a high computation event. The computer needs all it's resources to pump that much data through the bus - especially on capture / lay off. Sure, simple editing is not that taxing on the system, but if you are copying from your media drive to another drive and you have to render a transition or effect to that drive, you risk a hard lock crash and possibly corrupting the project sending it to that deep dark place from which it may never return. Is it worth the risk? Not for me. Like D says, you should manage your time better so you are copying on off-time (lunch / after work).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

To add to Joe's warning: The larger your clips, the less safe it is to do what you're talking about. Which is ironic, considering higher-quality HD material would take longer to copy and you'd probably be more tempted to try to push through that copy process while multi-tasking. But it's simple math -- the more traffic you push through the pipeline, the more system resources you're hogging, and the less safe it is to do it while changing files at the same time. Directory corruptions are also more likely, which can belly-up the copy process or the entire drive (destination as well as source).

If you do have to multi-task like this, I'd suggest copying in smaller batches, say 10GB at a time. It's like with rendering -- you have to do more operations, but breaking it up into chunks makes the process much safer.


www.derekmok.com

[Is it a bad idea to be copying the footage and editing?]

Yup!

- Loren
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