3. Setting Scratch Disks
A scratch disk is where Final Cut Pro stores all the media you capture, along with all audio and video render files. Because scratch disks are so important, Final Cut won't even start until you tell it where at least one scratch disk is located. As you learned earlier, I strongly recommend that you store all your timecode-based media (that is, the material you first captured on videotape) to a second hard drive. This exercise shows you how to set up your scratch disksboth for these exercises and real life.
| 1. | Choose Final Cut Pro HD> System Settings (Shift+Q).[View full size image] This screen allows you to set scratch disks. (Note the Scratch Disks tab at the top of the screen.)
NOTE | Scratch Disks
A scratch disk is a place that Final Cut uses to store the video and audio files that you capture, along with the various render files that it automatically creates as part of the editing process. As you learned earlier, scratch disks are so critical that Final Cut won't even start until you specify where they are. And, just to reinforce this point, it is equally critical that your scratch disk not be your boot disk. Put your media files on a separate disk from the operating system.Final Cut Pro allows you to have up to 16 scratch disks. However, you generally won't use anywhere close to that number because hard disks are getting bigger, allowing storage of far more media than even a year ago. And, the more FireWire drives you add, the slower they go. The general limit for efficient FireWire use is 5 to 7 drives, due to the nature of how FireWire com municates between devices. If you need more hard drive space than that, move up to a RAID.A RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a very high-performance, high-capacity storage system for video editing. It's also the most expensive. For DV footage, unless you have hours and hours and hours of material, a RAID is not necessary. For other video formats, however, RAIDs are often essential. |
[View full size image] | | 2. | To set your scratch disk, click the top Set button, and navigate to the media folder you created earlier on your second hard drive. In this example, I have the scratch disk pointing to the FCP Media folder on my second hard drive. Select the folder you want to use as a scratch disk (not the files in it), then click "Open." | | 3. | If you have multiple hard disks, create a scratch disk on each one of them by moving down to the next line in the Scratch Disk window that doesn't have a hard disk assigned to it. Click the Set button, navigate to the FCP Media folder you created on each disk, select it, and click Open. | | 4. | Be sure each line has all four columns checked. (It's normal for the Audio Capture check box to be grayed out.) If you are using DV video, it is perfectly OK for all four file types to be stored on one disk. There is virtually no reason to ever check the Capture Audio and Video to Separate Files check box unless you are in an HD environment, and, even then, check with your capture card manufacturer. Capturing audio and video to separate files causes far more problems than it is worth. | | 5. | You can leave the Waveform Cache, Thumbnail Cache, and Autosave Vault set to their default locations. These files are rarely large and can easily be stored on any hard disk. | | 6. | However, you do want to change the default setting of Minimum Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disks from its default setting of 2048 MB. Hard disks hold only a certain amount of data. Once they are full, they can't hold any more, obviously. What isn't obvious is that a hard disk gets full sooner than you expect.Essentially, you never want to fill a hard disk any fuller than about 95 percent of its capacity. The reason is that when a hard disk is reading or writing information, it creates invisible, temporary files. If there isn't sufficient room to create these temporary files, the hard disk just plain refuses to work.So, to prevent the calamity of your hard disk locking up, set Minimum Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disks to be 5 percent of the size of the largest hard disk that isn't your boot disk. A fast way to determine the size of your hard disk is to select it in the Finder, then choose File > Get Info. The Get Info window will show you the total capacity of your hard disk, how much space is available, and how much is used.For instance, let's say you have three hard disks:
Boot disk (internal):
160 GB
Internal hard disk #2:
80 GB
External hard disk #1:
120 GB
You would then set Minimum Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disks to 6000 MB (6 GB), which is 5 percent of the size of the largest hard disk that isn't the boot disk.Chapter 3, "Gather Your Media." | | 9. | That ends this initial exercise for setting preferences in Final Cut. To save your preferences, click OK in the bottom-right corner of the System Settings dialog. If you are done working with Final Cut, choose Final Cut Pro HD> Quit or press Cmd+Q. |
| Helpful Keyboard Shortcuts |
|---|
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|
| Option+Cmd+A | Open Applications folder (Finder only) | | Option+Cmd+U | Open Utility folder (Finder only in OS 10.3.x) | | Option+Cmd+D | Hide, or reveal, the Dock (all applications) | | Ctrl+Q | Open Easy Setup preference window | | Shift+Q | Open System Settings preference window | | Tab | Move forward between settings in a dialog | | Shift+Tab | Move backward between settings in a dialog | | Escape | Exit a dialog without saving any changes | | Enter (on keypad) | Close a dialog and save all changes | | Cmd+Q | Quit Final Cut Pro | |
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