Optimizing your disk space after editing a training video

Here at Pathways, we offer an impressive array of products and services, from traditional eLearning modules, to classroom training sessions. Among those products and services we offer the production of training videos, and the process goes from scripting, planning, location scouting, to production and post-production, and as the stages of the training video projects have an incredible amount of work associated with them, so does the aftermath of the project itself.

A few days ago, as I was working on an eLearning module using Storyline 360, I proceeded to save the file, and after almost one minute of the saving process, I got an error from Storyline, telling me that I ran out of space on my hard drive (!), which was a bit confusing, given that I have a 1 TB hard drive on my computer. So, I went to my Windows explorer, and upon checking my different partitions, I did indeed notice that my C partition had 0 space…

I then started to wonder what was the cause of that, and even with unused software (that I uninstalled), I only managed to free up to 10 GB of that partition. Thankfully, I remember a conversation I had with a colleague, in which she randomly pointed out that, when working on video projects with Adobe Premiere, that software tends to use a lot of hard drive space, and assuming that was the case since I had been working on a training video project for a few weeks, I googled the location where Adobe Premiere saves temporary data. To my surprise, when going to that folder, I saw that it was occupying almost 50 GB (!), which is a lot for a software alone.

Default cache folder and deleting unused data

What happens with Adobe Premiere, is that it caches every single media file when imported into a project, thus the disk space usage, however, these files are not necessary once you finish working on a project, even when you pause the project for a few days, you don’t need cached files until the next time you work on that specific project.

You can permanently delete those cached files, by going to the default cache folder, selecting all the files and pressing Shift+Delete (this will remove the files from the computer, without sending them to the recycling bin). The default folder (assuming you haven’t already changed it), can usually be found here:

C:/Users/<Your User Name>/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files

Keep in mind that the ‘AppData’ folder is hidden by default, so you need to configure your Windows explorer to show hidden files and folders.

Changing the cache folder location

If you don’t feel comfortable (like myself) leaving this path by default, and to avoid issues in the future with disk space, you can change the media cache folder location, by opening Adobe Premiere, going to ‘Edit’ and selecting ‘Media Cache’ under the ‘Preferences’ option.

In the dialogue box, you can browse a new location for the Media Cache Files folder, hopefully a location a bit more under your control: