Premiere - Best workflow for setting scratch discs?

I often work off external drives, one per project. So I'll keep everything on that drive, project file, media files, scratch discs. So when I hand it back to the client it's all there.

With FCP7, it was pretty easy, if a scratch disc was missing, you could change it before the project would fully open.

However, with Premiere, if you set your scratch drive as described above, and you're working on multiple projects, it will prompt you that your scratch disks are unavailable, and will automatically set it to your Documents folder.

Then you have to wait to the program is fully loaded, and change it within the preferences/settings.

Then you repeat the process each time you open a different project.

The smoothest thing I've found is to just keep your scratch discs for all projects to one dedicated drive, but then I can't really work how I describe above. I guess the client can just determine the scratch disc when they get the drive and it will rebuild everything.

Anyhow would love to hear how others are handling it?

Yeah keeping them on a dedicated drive is good. Wish I had a better answer for this too.

The scratch disk location is stored on the project level. What is stored on the global (app) level is the cache.



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Yeah, but if it moves, you don;t have the option to reset it before loading the project, and it wants to default to the documents folder, so as soon you get the project open it starts putting junk in your documents folder.

It's also a pain on some SANs - it seems to want to rebuild every time you open a project on a new workstation. Or at least it was when I was at a place where I had to move workstations a fair bit last year.

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it seems to want to rebuild every time you open a project on a new workstation.

Yep, and if you're working on multiple projects it's a nightmare, unless you set it to one place and keep it there for all projects.

How bad is it to have your Media cache/scratch discs on the boot drive? I might just get a dedicated external drive, call it Premiere cache or scratch
and direct all projects there until I can figure a better solution. The client will have to rebuild it on their end and we all know that's going to go smoothly.

We are talking about the cache files. You can leave it on the boot drive if you are working in a single user environment. Ideally this should be on a reasonably fast drive so preferably not a USB or fire wire drive. The cache files will consist of transcoded audio files, and a few other light but essential files that help Premiere deal with many formats natively. If you choose to leave it on the boot drive, you may want to run through it once in a while and delete unnecessary files because that folder can grow after a while.

In a shared environment, it can be beneficial to have everyone point to the same scratch location so everyone can access the same cache files without having to recache the files.



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When I was on the job where we moved stations a lot last year all the data was stored on a central server, and yet whenever a project was opened on a machine different to the one it was opened on last time, it wanted to remake all the files. This took AGES. Not sure if this is still the case. Where I am now we have a large SAN but hardly ever move work from station to station.

Maybe there's some setting that could help manage this problem better?

Make sure the Apple time server (NTP) is properly configured if you are working off a NAS. The difference in time stamps can throw the machines off.



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