Do you have to keep editing when you travel?

This week on MacBreak Studio, I talk with Steve Martin from Ripple Training about taking your edit on the road.

The scenario is this: you are editing in your office on a Mac Pro with your media on a large RAID like a Pegasus2. You've decided to keep your media outside the library (or you've consolidated to an external location). You are heading out of town for a few days and you'd like to keep editing on your MacBook Pro – but you don't want to lug a big RAID along with you.

To reduce the footprint your media requires and to get improved playback performance from a portable thunderbolt drive, you can create proxy versions of your media. If you didn't do it when you imported your media, you can do it afterwards, and the transcoding takes place in the background during times you aren't actively editing.

Because this proxy media is stored inside the library (as is all “generated” media including transcoded media like proxy and optimized media as well as render files), all you need to do is copy your library – a single bundle file – to your portable drive. When you open this library on the road, it may appear offline initially if you have been editing with native media, but all you need to do is switch to proxy and you are off and running.

When you return to your edit suite, how do you then get this updated project back onto your main editing system? That is where this week's episode offers a simple solution: rather than copying the library, with all the proxy media inside it, back to your Mac Pro or your RAID, all you need to do is copy the updated project file. Watch above to see exactly how.