Storage

There is a plethora of drives available to you when editing in YSTV, this guide should give you some idea of how to use them and where various files should live. These drives are all found under their names and letters in Computer on each Windows PC.

Editing workflow

• Capture: You should capture to the D: drive, then copy to P:.
• Starting an editing session: If it is not already on the D: drive, copy your project from P:, then edit as normal.
• Finishing an editing session: Copy the files you have changed to P: to make sure they are caught by the backup. If you don't do this you may lose work.
• Finishing a show and exporting: Export your show to D: then copy to S:.
• Having uploaded and checked your show: Erase the files you were using from D:, L: and P:.

Local drives

Local means the drives are inside the PCs you are sitting at.

Tempvideo (D:)

This is a 1TB drive. Here you will find a folder called Shows, to store files and projects you're currently working on.

• Capture to this drive (then move to Pending Edits if you're not editing immediately).
• Edit directly from this drive (always copy files from Pending Edits to here to edit, then back when you're done).
• Export to this drive (before copying to Finished Shows).

Never leave important files on this drive without a copy somewhere else. Files in Tempvideo should always be duplicated on Pending Edits or Finished Shows. Local drives are not backed up, whereas network drives are backed up every night. In the event that one of the Tempvideo drives fails, if your files are not duplicated elsewhere, they are lost permanently.

Please try to clean out your old projects from this drive when they are done, scrapped or stalled for more than a week, to leave space for others. In keeping with the policy on never leaving important files on Tempvideo, the Computing Team may delete files from here to make space if the drive becomes too full. Warning will usually be given, but not always.

The other edit machine's Tempvideo (L:)

Each Edit PC, in addition to its own Tempvideo, can also access the Tempvideo of the other Edit PC, as drive L: (unless the other machine is turned off or moved, in which case drive L: will show as disconnected).

• If you've left something on the other Edit PC which you want to work on, copy or move it across to the Tempvideo drive of your machine before working on it.

• Never edit directly from the other Edit PC's Tempvideo (your L: drive). This causes your Edit PC to try to read from and write to your project files over the network connection between the two PCs, which is far too slow to support this and leads to slow and unreliable editing.

The same warning regarding leaving files apply as to Tempvideo.

Network drives

Network drives are inside servers in the rack behind the sound desk. They are accessed over the station network.

Pending Edits (P:)

This is part of the 1.8TB RAID 5 array on our fileserver, and mounts as P:. This drive should contain:

• All in-progress productions including images, music, captured video and the project (.prproj) files.
• To edit, copy relevant files to your Tempvideo drive (D:), and when you are done copy them back.
• After capturing, the captured files should be copied here and spot-checked before you relinquish the tapes.

• Note that if you copied a project and all of the captured footage from this drive to Tempvideo, you only need to copy back the project file, as the footage will not have changed.

This drive is backed up nightly to the backup server, and is in a redundant RAID 5 array - so it would take a total of 4 simultaneous hard disk failures to lose data, which is highly unlikely.

Finished Shows (S:)

This is another part of the RAID array on the file server, and mounts as S:. This drive should contain only completed productions, and is where the website pulls video files from for encoding and adding as live videos.

• Do not export directly to this drive (as your export will fail if the network glitches or becomes busy).

• Export to Tempvideo instead and copy to here afterwards.

• Once your show is up on the website, you should delete your files in Pending Edits and Tempvideo, as this drive preserves a high-quality copy of finished shows (e.g. for NaSTA).

Note that this drive will likely get wiped shortly after NaSTA, and the HD playout videos will become the high-quality archive.

This drive is backed up in the same way as Pending Edits.

Show Resources (R:)

Ongoing shows often generate files such as title sequences, running orders, music and graphics, which should be preserved here. This is also where VTs should be uploaded to. Never edit from this drive.

This also contains:

• A stock footage folder, where anything which you feel may come in handy later should go (be selective here, not everything you captured)
• The station image library, for photos, graphics and logos relevant to many future productions and Commercial Team use.

This drive is backed up in the same way as Pending Edits.

Documents (O:)

This drive should contain documents that are considered important but not overly sensitive, such as the society's budget, PDFs of manuals for equipment or running orders for shows.

Note that your home directory should be used for storage of anything you are working on at the moment, or which is of a sensitive nature, as it can only be accessed by you.

Software (M:)

This drive has some ISOs and some of YSTV's custom software. Mostly of use to the Computing Team.

Playout (Y:)

This drive contains all the playout videos, which are the highest quality copy of anything no longer in Finished Shows. Do not save anything to this drive, only the encode server should add files here.

Your Home Directory (H:)

This is also the Documents and Downloads folders on Windows. It contains your mailbox and all of your personal files, along with the www folder. You can use this to store anything you please, however note that the contents of the Downloads folder will be deleted when you log out.