[Closed] Macbooks, disk space and video editing

Simplest solution is to buy a USB SSD external drive, which will be much faster than a HD external drive.

I tried running a vm on my mba on an external drive - no dice. Just wouldn't run quick enough for life let alone editing.

I've ended up just being really good at housekeeping - things go straight onto the nas once they're done with. I'd have thought 256 should be more than enough? 128 here and I can just about cope, 256 would be a minimum next time though.

What year? I've got an old 2010 and the disk upgrade was a piece of piss.

Its a mid-2014, kids and itunes doesnt help. But gopro studio massively expands files for editing/compiling purposes and the windows 10 machine is 60GB, but yeah its sort of manageable, but i always seem to have to clear space before i can do something (actually just realise same in the kitchen and garage so maybe a metaphor for my life!). Maybe kick the kids profiles off, and make do, the disk upgrade i found was nearly 500 quid and not instock! Technicaly the upgrade doesnt lookthathard but it does require you to go off-piste in terms of support etc, my first mac, so probaly a bit scared, happy ripping guts out of pc's Tried running vm off external drive and it kinda works but sucks.

The ssd seems to be chips on a card and not very well supported by the after market crowd,

Does it have to be go pro studio? Why not get software that can run with the raw video file without having to decompress it and create large files? Might find that by doing that the the data rates are within the capacity of the sub hdd

Interesting angle fisha, i assumed they'd all do that. Being a bit cheap it seems ok and the price is right.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

Might not be what you're after but I've got a Nifty minidrive in my Macbook Pro which allows you to use the SD slot at a hard drive. It takes a Micro SD card. I've moved my iTunes library onto that so there's more space on the SSD. It's obviously not as fast as a proper hard drive but good enough for iTunes.

Try a download of adobe premiere elements for 30 days free and see how it goes. Premiere pro is able to edit my canon 6d 1080p files movies natively imported to the project without any conversion beforehand, I presume elements would do the same.

I've been able to edit hd footage on a usb 2tb drive using an 2011 iMac. ( I've used the same drive in a FireWire connection as well)

As above putting a 500gb ssd in is pretty easy - I've done 4 maxhines now, we have had a few threads. This should cost you about £125 inc a caddy to put the 256ssd in so you can keep using it

If not interested in that then look to move your oibraries onto externalmdeives or cloud storage. Basically you really want just the OS and the files you care currently working with on the ssd. You cn get 1tb of external drive storage for £50 if outright speed access to your library isn't a priority. Without checking I don't think that MBP has usb3 so an external ssd is a bit watsed as speed throttled by the usb2

OP if you can wait a month I'll be able to help assuming you are not too far from postcode SO31. Most amount of time is spent copying files across. Switching the harddrive takes 10 mins and hardest part imo is undoing the Phillips screws on base. Also a Torx 10 (?) screw driver or "allen type key" required.

OP apologies just checked and of course your machine is one of the newer thinner ones with PCIe SSD's which are more pricey - £350-ish for 500GB

As above cheapest is manual optimisation of fikes and libraries / completed video projects stored off the machine

Why not use final cut? It's cheap, and very economical with resources so you may not even have to work on proxies. An external drive (for video) should be connected with thunderbolt and either be raid or SSD. I use an ordinary LaCie D2 HD but with a fast SSD card inserted for working files and a scratch disk which means I can output any renders to that instead of having the drive crunching the numbers also having the file written to it, this speeds things up even further.

Premiere is not available as a stand alone product (AFAIK) but you would have to subscribe to CS.

Without checking I don't think that MBP has usb3 so an external ssd is a bit watsed as speed throttled by the usb2

With something like Adobe Premiere you can do all your edits on lower res versions then replace the clips for the render. So you only need to have the smaller ones on the machine, rest on a NAS and leave it to render for a bit.

As for long term just boot everything off to a NAS when your done, depending on the NAS and network connections (wired is much better) you could even edit from there

Thanks all, loads of food for thought there. My NAS is a basic wd consumer unit, need to get a thunderbolt ethernet dongle to use wired (again thanks for being too thin). I'll have a look at final cut and premiere elements, have a copy of v10 but wont install on el capitan for some reason.

I have a wd usb3 drive but it is hdd not ssd, As mentioned before seems pretty slow.

Ive looked at the small form factor sd cards which could work to offload the stuff like itunes that doesnt need the performance. That's a good shout, didnt think of using it indirectly like that to help the problem. Doh.

Cheers all.

As Mr Smith confirms its has USB3 then an external SSD is best option, caddy plus 500GB would be £120 (?). As above key thing imo with external drive is to get the libraries on it, the stuff you don't look at often. Why not put all the kids stuff on external, so what if its a bit slow for them ? 🙂