Ideal hard drive setup for best rendering performance on Premiere & AE

[karmalp]

Hey guys,

I have set up my new work station to be ready for fast 4K video editing on Premiere and following online editing with After Effects.

This is the set up:

- 27" iMac Mid 2017 (512GB SSD, 3.8GHz, 40GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8GB video memory)
- Samsung T5 1TB SSD drive
- G-RAID with Thunderbolt 3 8TB HDD

So the idea is to reduce the render/export time as much as I can.

For this, my plan is to:

- use the internal SSD mainly as the boot drive where the software is installed
- keep all the large original video footage (anything from 1080p DNxHD to 4K RED 200fps material) on my RAID
- and use the Samsung T5 as the main working drive for the current video project including media cache folders and output export files.

Does this make sense to you?
Is it a good idea to separate the source and the output files?
Or would I even get better performance by putting the video footage onto the T5 SSD as well and only transfer the project to the RAID once I am finished with it?
I can't really estimate the speed difference between the SSD and the RAID so would be great if you guys could help me on that.

Thank you so so much in advance.

Cheers
Harun

 

[wonderspark]

For encoding and rendering, faster and more CPUs/cores gives better performance. This is what makes the biggest difference.

In consideration of drive volumes, you would ideally have at least three drives. One for programs/apps/OS, one for media and one for output of encodes/rendering. The trick there is that the media and output are on their own bus, so the data isn't going back and forth against each other on the same bus. In other words, it's read on one drive, and output to another, not two partitions on the same volume. However, if the volume is fast enough, it won't matter.

For After Effects, use multiprocessing, and experiment with your work using all the different settings on RAM allocation, etc. I ran every combination of settings to figure out which was fastest for me without crashes. With 32GB of RAM, I set aside 6GB for other programs, and when I bumped to 48GB of RAM, I set aside 8GB of RAM, for example. Reserving a bit of resources for other apps will prevent crashes during output, which makes any extra performance wasted on redoing it.