Can I edit from an external hard drive and render it back to that same drive?

March 30, 2021 17:47

I'm running Camtasia 2020 and my internal hard drive is very full (and small), and I have tons of videos I have to edit and render. Am I able to plug in an external hard drive with the raw videos, open it and edit it on Camtasia on my desktop, and then render it back onto that external hard drive without ever needing to store any videos on my internal hard drive?

I've been trying this over the past few days, and it seems to be working, but there's usually a warning that pops up and says I shouldn't be doing this. Would this create a problem down the line? From the videos that I did do this with, they seemed to all come out fine, except a recent batch, which didn't produce playable videos (but I'm thinking that could have been an error due to something else).

Comments

1 comment

Graphicious

March 30, 2021 17:50
Hi,

I edit like this several projects every day, using an external USB hard drive, for the same reasons.

I've never had problems.

Of course, if during editing your hard drive gets disconnected for some reason, that could give you unpredictable results.

But apart from that, and to mention your other problem: if you get a render/production that is unplayable, that is most likely due to insufficient hard drive space in the temporary location. Camtasia uses the temporary folder configured in the settings to store temporary render files or assets that go into a project's final video.

Every time I've had a corrupted video it was due to insufficient space on the partition where that folder is.

Typically it's in somewhere like C:\\ .... \AppData\Local\Temp

You can change it in Settings > Advanced.

I hope this helps.

Cristi
1