VIDEO AUDIO FILE STORAGE ?'s self taught indie production newb more artist hands on experience than education

[Jermicidal138]

Im using my 2021 24' M1 iMac for video editing and audio recording/podcasting and Im looking for file management &storage tips. Ive got several external drives Ipicked up right away. one 4TB thats barely half full and an unopened 8TB. when I first got it I was negligent about keeping thing stored externally as much as possible and it got bogged down fairly quickly with 4k video files and 4k 360 files as well as raw photos from my sony fx 3 and as7iii
I recently lost my art studio/podcasting studio and as I finish up rebuilding and rethinking it ( Im pretty New to it all) Im trying to be more conscious of optimizing. Im about to put finishing touches on things and start fresh so I figured I would factory restart my iMac and be sure I only save whats absolutely necessary on it. I edit video in finalcut pro and for audio I use Logic pro. I came from learning on a hand me down 2013 27' iMac that was pretty much maxed out and was a great machine for almost ten years.

 

[R S K]

First and foremost you need to make sure none of the disks are Windows formatted. (ExFAT)

Other than that I really don't know what it is you're asking. "How to organize?" is entirely dependent on your personal workflow, what type of media, types of projects, etc., etc., etc. … there is no one or right way.

 

[chrfr]

Make sure that regardless of where you store your videos, you have at least a second copy elsewhere. Keeping all your files on a single external disk only is extremely risky.

 

[R S K]

The smartest thing you can (at minimum) do is use two external disks. One that houses the original media and the second carries your library to which you copy the media upon import. Redundancy level 1: ✔

 

[JamesMay82]

this is a good guide. I follow this now but I use to just keep all my files within one final cut library which was 1.5TB. I was told not to do this as it can slow final cut down although I've never noticed a difference since stopping.. I'd go with the below though if I was you and have another external to back it up as well. and ideally a 3rd to keep offsite.

 

[R S K]

It won't slow anything down, it's just a really bad idea. Doesn't get any more dangerous than that! Never mind it being an organizational nightmare.