Location of working folders & proxy folders

[RickMen]

I have SSD (C:) (M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD 2300/1940 MB/s) which has the OS and the programs installed. I also have a HDD (SATA 6Gb/s) (D:) which holds all my data files (including documents folder, download folder, Pictures folder etc and the source raw clips (FHD TOD & 4K mp4), final rendered clips, audio and VSP files). I have configured the VS Preferences setting so that the Working, Audio Working and the Proxy folders all point to various folder locations on the HDD (D:) drive. Is this the best setup for VS? Any recommendations/suggestions?

[lata]

That seems to be the way I do things.
I keep my C Drive dedicated to program installations, trying to keep that as clean as possible reduces its size.
I then create a System Image of the C Drive as a backup, just in case.
My D Drive holds my media files, Video, Images, Audio, each project having its own dedicated folder, vsp’s being saved here.
Working folders are allocated to the D Drive.

There is a separate working folder for burning DVD / Bluray, if you do create discs then you may wish to allocate that to the D Drive.
Smart Proxy again on the D Drive, if I have multiple versions of video studio then I use the same Smart Proxy folder for all Video Studio versions, one proxy file being used by all versions.

[RickMen]

Thanks for the feedback.

[RickMen]

With the audio working folder, do you have one audio folder per dedicated project folder or just one folder on the drive (like the proxy folder setup)?

[Davidk]

Try to keep all the various data files (video clips, audio (music, spoken voice, specific sounds), photos) that you use on separate drives, or at least completely separate folders, desirably stored by some method you use- eg, all video by year and event, and photos by year, all music by theme (classical, RnR, jazz etc)and so on - to the main VS program installation. Make this a work practice whether you use a default install (everything on C) or a custom install. You choose these drives/folders when installing the program, or when setting preferences. It makes it a lot easier to find files you know you have if there's an organised pattern to where they are. Every student I had with VS over 10 years at some stage said to themselves and often me "where did I put that file??" Knowing the pattern makes them easy to find and avoids duplicates, which cut into your storage space. Apart from the knowlege of pattern, several basic reasons for the practice
1. you can use any of these files in multiple projects. Having any data file in a specific project folder means that any change to the project folder (eg you delete it or move it) removes that multi-use flexibility.
2. ordinarily you won't keep a particular version of the editor forever: when installing later versions it's common to uninstall/delete the old one(s). And doing that may delete any of the data files you have used with that older version, stored in it's data structures.

[lata]

With the audio working folder, do you have one audio folder per dedicated project folder or just one folder on the drive (like the proxy folder setup)?

I choose the same working folder for video and audio, if i worked with more audio I would probably have a separate folder.
Many moons ago Corel did not provide an audio folder, just the one working folder.

[Davidk]

Persuading yvonne to provide an audio folder is one of the things I managed to effect with VS - because, stored in a working folder it is all too easy to delete everything in it (it is after all a temporary junk folder) - or a clean up program does that for you. I lost a lot of audio files that way, before audio became a separate folder.