Managing disk space

[Anonymous]

First of all, thanks to everyone (particularly Brian) who has been kind enough to answer all my questions...pretty sure I've got plenty more where they've come from.

For my next trick, I need to learn how to (better) manage my disk space. This morning, I blinked & about 200GB that I had last night was instantly used up. First of all, I know that I need to get it together to use Proxies, because right now I'm working with the original media at full res, and that is obviously a space killer. I'll do that on my next project. For now, I can tell, by looking at Preferences > Storage > Volume Statistics that probably 90% of the stuff in the Nb FullRes Frames column (from this current project as well as others) is unnecessary & not needed. The problem is, I don't know how to free up that space or, better yet, distinguish between what I need vs. what I don't. I know that the majority of that stuff has to be caches from old renders or whatever, but I have no idea how to free up that space.

I've been trying to carefully mess with the other stuff in Preference > Storage (Space Calculation, Available, Available & Purgeable, Force Purge), but I'm not having a whole lot of success, as in, what I'm reading in the manual isn't necessarily reflecting what is happening in real life. For example, when I hit the Available, Available and Purgeable, or Force Purge buttons, I get: "FRAMESTORE: recomputing available Framestore space", followed by no additional information. And when I hit Test Disks: TEST DISKS: Sequential Frame Read. 0.00 fps. 0.00 spf. 0.00 MBps, which I know (or think) can't be the case because I'm able to playback & edit stuff.

So I'm not exactly sure what's going on, other than the fact that I'm getting dangerously low on disk space, and I know it's full of stuff that I probably don't really need. I think there is approximately one page in the manual out of 45,000 or so devoted to this topic & so far that hasn't helped much.

Many thanks.

[arichards]

Hi Hilary,

I'm not an expert on this so I'll just contribute until somebody more knowledgable chimes in.

If you want to totally dispense with footage from your library/desktop, I know that dragging them down to the bottom of the interface deletes them from the system. This does not happen straight away (you can undo, etc.), but when you shut down and start Smoke up again, the system's housekeeping cycle deletes this footage and so frees up space.

I didn't really think about this until a few weeks into using it and then it really freed up my use of Smoke a little more. Without an external raid (I'm just about to purchase a Promise Pegasus), I was using the internal 1tb HD and so I was a little conservative with creating clips between the modules as I didn't really know how to get rid of them (I was even wrongly deleting dpx files manually from the 'managed' folder to free space!!).

Anyway perhaps this method of dragging-down deleting is not what you are looking for however (more of a scratch method for temporary footage?) and you want to to keep the metadata info while deleting the underlying footage? This I do not know but I know there is also a method for doing this. I think it involves some entries in the library whereby you either delete/disconnect the footage/file (while keeping the references) or replace it with proxies? I think there was a tutorial by Grant Kay on it, that should be somewhere in his newly organised list of tutorials at the top of the page...

Anyway I'm sure somebody will chime in with a fuller picture later...

Cheers
Tony

[Anonymous]

Thanks & I'll look for that tutorial. I'll also restart Smoke (already having deleted some stuff) & see what effect that has.

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Hillary.

Please take a look at this Knowledge Base article for more ideas on freeing up storage space:
How to free space on the media storage volume.

Regards,
Robert.

[BKM]

Media management is a big animal. A lot goes into it. So much of it is dependent on your workflow and media you are working with. IE: Can you work with unmanaged frames on a raid that will play clips in real time? Should you work with proxies? Consolidating handles. Working with History. Freeing up intermediate renders in an edit.

You will get used to it once you know how Smoke manages the processing internally.

One tip: (assuming you can play frames of a soft-import storage in real time)
When you are done with your edit, and it's Final, but you don't want to archive or delete the project just yet... you can do a Hard Commit on an empty top Layer. Once you have a solid clip, you can go to the tools and choose unrender and unrender your timeline. The Hard Commit will keep a playable version you can still show people. If changes need to be made, you can just toss the hard commit layer, make changes, reprocess and tada. Goto Preferences and Force Purge to get the frames back instantly.

(If your soft imports don't playback in real time) - Then you can add a simple dummy soft effect to a clip. A CC with no adjustment or a RZ. This will process the clip on the framestore and then you can do your Hard Commit. The processed clip will allow you to play off your framestore in real time.
Assuming you can normally.

Bonus Tip: When looking at the standard player. To the right you will see the Framestore Space remainign and the needed frame amount needed for Processing the unrendered clips. It will turn RED when you don't have enough frames.

[Anonymous]

Totally what I was looking for in the moment. I know I've got a lot to learn about media management...

[Anonymous]

Yeah I've got a few things yet to learn about how Smoke deals with media management (and, oh yeah, all the rest of it). I can 'feel' that it's pretty flexible & robust, I just don't know how to make it work for me yet - instead of me working for it, which is what's going on right now.

Those are both good tips for the thing I'm doing right now...I'll definitely be putting them to use in a few minutes.

I was wondering about the red Framestore space. I noticed that it changed, but didn't know what it was trying to tell me.

Brian, you should teach Smoke classes. Oh, wait...you do.

Much thanks as always.

[Anonymous]

Yeah I've got a few things yet to learn about how Smoke deals with media management (and, oh yeah, all the rest of it). I can 'feel' that it's pretty flexible & robust, I just don't know how to make it work for me yet - instead of me working for it, which is what's going on right now.

Those are both good tips for the thing I'm doing right now...I'll definitely be putting them to use in a few minutes.

I was wondering about the red Framestore space. I noticed that it changed, but didn't know what it was trying to tell me.

Brian, you should teach Smoke classes. Oh, wait...you do.

Much thanks as always.

[Anonymous]

Robert...so I've now gotten around to trying this. It's telling me -bash: vic : command not found. I know that it exists, because the executable is sitting right here in /usr/discreet/io/2012.SP2/bin/

I'm not totally rocking the UNIX terminal like I used to be, so I've forgotten how to get that executable to, you know, execute in this situation. Do I copy it into /usr/bin/ or...?

[Anonymous]

So, yeah, I just went & tried it. Copied vic into /usr/bin, and it definitely executed. Problem is now, it doesn't want to let me do it because I'm not root user, and sudo isn't cutting it either. Do I really have to enable root user to do this? Is there that some piece of day 1 knowledge that everyone has but me? Is there really not an easier way to purge floating frames?

I'm getting close. Thanks for the help. Eagerly awaiting reply.

[BKM]

@hillary I was never much for the UNIX way of doing things. I have found that using Purge Frames in the Preferences menu under Storage works pretty well. It is always good to run VIC at some time, but a relaunch of Smoke should run VIC when it boots. After that old frames should be gone. Sometimes in a project, due to crashes and such, you can get a LOST+FOUND library. It may have some old frames. You can delete that library anytime it appears to remove those frames.

To manually run VIC: Open a terminal

vic -v stonefs7 - The normal vic command. This is the command that is executed when the application starts, or when stone+wire starts.

More good VIC info:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=15492957&linkID=9242618

[Anonymous]

So, yeah, I just went & tried it. Copied vic into /usr/bin, and it definitely executed. Problem is now, it doesn't want to let me do it because I'm not root user, and sudo isn't cutting it either. Do I really have to enable root user to do this? Is there that some piece of day 1 knowledge that everyone has but me? Is there really not an easier way to purge floating frames?

I'm getting close. Thanks for the help. Eagerly awaiting reply.

[Anonymous]

So, yeah, I just went & tried it. Copied vic into /usr/bin, and it definitely executed. Problem is now, it doesn't want to let me do it because I'm not root user, and sudo isn't cutting it either. Do I really have to enable root user to do this? Is there that some piece of day 1 knowledge that everyone has but me? Is there really not an easier way to purge floating frames?

I'm getting close. Thanks for the help. Eagerly awaiting reply.

[Anonymous]

So I spent part of today consolidating & deleting unnecessary stuff within Smoke projects, & making sure old stuff was deleted, etc. Then going off of the information that vic runs every time you start Smoke, I was expecting several GB of Framestore stuff (whose existence I verified by locating it manually in the managed folder file structure) to be deleted. Try as I might, I can't get those several GB to delete...and I know you're not really "supposed to" go into the file structure & delete it manually. I can't get vic to run as a Terminal command unless I'm root user...so, I guess I'm wondering what the right thing is to do in this situation.

Thanks.

[BKM]

You can Google how to activate ROOT on OSX.
Does Purge frames from the Preferences do anything?
Can you look at your projects and see if you see a Lost+Found Directory?

[Anonymous]

Fortunately, the one thing I *do* know how to do is activate root user 🙂

Purge Frames doesn't *appear* to be doing anything. When I look at Volume Statistics before & after I do Purge Frames, nothing changes. The frame counts remain the same. Also, when I go into Finder to have a look at all the managed subfolders, all of those remain the same sizes as well.

By 'Lost+Found Directory' do you mean a Lost+Found clip library within a project? If so, I've been on the lookout for that since I started this process & I haven't seen it yet. From what I've read, I suppose it's possible that if vic isn't able to run correctly, or at all because of the whole root user thing, maybe that's why the Lost+Found isn't being created?

[Anonymous]

Fortunately, the one thing I *do* know how to do is activate root user 🙂

Purge Frames doesn't *appear* to be doing anything. When I look at Volume Statistics before & after I do Purge Frames, nothing changes. The frame counts remain the same. Also, when I go into Finder to have a look at all the managed subfolders, all of those remain the same sizes as well.

By 'Lost+Found Directory' do you mean a Lost+Found clip library within a project? If so, I've been on the lookout for that since I started this process & I haven't seen it yet. From what I've read, I suppose it's possible that if vic isn't able to run correctly, or at all because of the whole root user thing, maybe that's why the Lost+Found isn't being created?

[Anonymous]

Fortunately, the one thing I *do* know how to do is activate root user 🙂

Purge Frames doesn't *appear* to be doing anything. When I look at Volume Statistics before & after I do Purge Frames, nothing changes. The frame counts remain the same. Also, when I go into Finder to have a look at all the managed subfolders, all of those remain the same sizes as well.

By 'Lost+Found Directory' do you mean a Lost+Found clip library within a project? If so, I've been on the lookout for that since I started this process & I haven't seen it yet. From what I've read, I suppose it's possible that if vic isn't able to run correctly, or at all because of the whole root user thing, maybe that's why the Lost+Found isn't being created?

[Anonymous]

Fortunately, the one thing I *do* know how to do is activate root user 🙂

Purge Frames doesn't *appear* to be doing anything. When I look at Volume Statistics before & after I do Purge Frames, nothing changes. The frame counts remain the same. Also, when I go into Finder to have a look at all the managed subfolders, all of those remain the same sizes as well.

By 'Lost+Found Directory' do you mean a Lost+Found clip library within a project? If so, I've been on the lookout for that since I started this process & I haven't seen it yet. From what I've read, I suppose it's possible that if vic isn't able to run correctly, or at all because of the whole root user thing, maybe that's why the Lost+Found isn't being created?

[Anonymous]

First of all, what is the deal with all these double (and triple and quadruple) posts?????

Second of all, to the matter at hand, even when I executed vic as root, I got the same message....that my effective user ID isn't 0 (root), and it declined to initiate the vic procedure.