Blackmagic Forum

I need help or atleast to understand.
I havent been using davinci for a long time, but im stuck because my hard drive cant take anymore torture. Yesterday, 3 hours before working on my second proyect, I had 300 gb of storage left in my hard drive, but when i go check how much space davinci took, I have 28 Kb... KILOBITES, i had to delete a game to have enoph storage to save my work and from 21 gb of storage it droped to 1gb left, from one save. The video i was editing waesnt even 1/3 edited and was in 1080p, it was 1 hour long or around 1gb in total. And my other proyect my hdd went from 500gbs to 700gbs used, and that was after i deleted the proyect. I dont want to lose my proyect, but this is leaving me no choice, i might have to delete the davinci if I want to get done in my computer. I hacent seen anyone with this problem or if its just the norm, I need someone to explain it to me or if they know any causes for 300 GIGABITES GONE FOR 1/3 OF A PROYECT.

Thanks for understanding, please help

Burning Ice wrote:because my hard drive cant take anymore torture

Your overall system configuration might help a bit with gathering advice. When you say "your hard drive"... are you saying that you are trying to use your boot drive for all your applications? This is highly ill-advised,

In general practice, you should probably have at least 3 drives for working with Resolve and its current system demands. One boot drive for the operating system and application software, one main media source drive and one more "scratch" drive where all the temporary renders, stills, and "smart" caches are accessed.

The last two need to be the largest and fastest you can afford. A few Terabytes (for HD production), several TB (12 or so for UHD production) and preferably RAIDed for minimum read/write access time.

Specific to your case, it sounds as if you may inadvertently have an "Uncompressed" codec selected as your smart cache or proxy/optimized format - or some other similar error - where your original media gets multiplied by x10 for storage requirement. That is, 30 GB of ProRes or DnX will turn into 300 GB of 10-bit Uncompressed.

jPo, CSI

Thank you very much for your help
And yes, by hard drive I mean boot drive, I might think of adding more storage in the future.
Ill check my settings, to check if its uncompressed, I hope thats the problem, because im not doing intense or big scale editing.

In anycase thanks for the help

JPOwens wrote:
In general practice, you should probably have at least 3 drives for working with Resolve and its current system demands. One boot drive for the operating system and application software, one main media source drive and one more "scratch" drive where all the temporary renders, stills, and "smart" caches are accessed.

I have a follow-on question about this. I currently use a RAID 5 array for both media storage and scratch drive. Is that going to be a problem? I have Resolve on my boot drive, of course, but my media files and scratch drive are on the RAID. I'm just trying to understand if/why I should get a third drive dedicated only to media storage.

Brad Hurley wrote:if/why I should get a third drive dedicated only to media storage.

For me, it's a book-keeping exercise to keep temporarily-generated files away from my (clients') original source media -- makes for easier deletion to segregate the paths, removables, re-connections...

Don't really know if there is a huge speed access gain, but if you are using very different density optimized proxies it may help with overall transcoding handoffs and read/write within an active project. Not so much probably if you have many drives spinning in a RAID. I used to have 20 in a RAID-3 configuration over a fibre-optic interface, so no real problem with access times. However, now I have 2x2 4TB (8+8TB) drives internally mounted in a MacPro 5,1 so I mapped them as 2x RAID -0 with path name "video_storage" and "scratch". Both RAIDS are really just pack animals carrying cloned files of the original originals; speed, speed, and more speed being the top three reasons for their existence.

jPo, CSI

JPOwens wrote:

Brad Hurley wrote:if/why I should get a third drive dedicated only to media storage.

For me, it's a book-keeping exercise to keep temporarily-generated files away from my (clients') original source media -- makes for easier deletion to segregate the paths, removables, re-connections...

Thanks! I do store my original-originals on a separate drive for safekeeping, so the cloned media files on my RAID are a second set (three cheers for Resolve's built-in cloning tool, which I use to clone lots of files that I want to be sure copy correctly and completely, including audio), but I haven't noticed any speed issues yet...I'm only editing HD and currently just one relatively small project.

i don't use a"scratch" drive, but i do make sure all caches/misc media etc is in a seperate folder from the cam orig
i do have two arrays one for target, one for source to keep renders fast and happy