Hi all,

I'm working in Composer 5.5 on a project that has alot of footage in it.  I was wondering if anyone can recommend a safe maximum amount of footage that I should bring into the project before the Avid starts getting slow or crashing? Or if there even is a limit to the number of footage you can bring in?

Also, you should know that I'm using AMA linking for EX1 footage and then consolidating it to a 16 TB tower that the project references.  In this case, will Avid work fine with referencing tons of footage being AMA linked?

Thanks for reading my post! I look forward to reading what you recommend.

I had a project that was 760 megs one time.  It's not so much about the size of the project as the size of the bins and how many you have open.  A bin with long sequences can easily hit 50 megs.  4 gigs of free ram that's not being used by other programs helps.

The 760 meg project I had was edited using EX1 footage.  I had just over 2TB and it was probably over 15,000 media files (not clips, as audio and video are different files in the mxf folder).

Footage is never an issue AFAIK. Sequences, and the amount of tracks in them, and the amount of clips associated with them, are bin fillers. I try to keep bins under 30-40MB or so. My projects usually end up between 1 and 2 GB (with many, many sync clips and sequences, normally 8-10 V-tracks and 16-24 A-tracks. Used to have some slowness issues back in the days of the 3GB RAM limit in the days of 32-bit OS-es, but ever since we can use way more RAM, those sizes work fine (8-12 GB).

Strictly talking about overall project size, there seems to be a fairly high ceiling.

In MC4 and MC6, I've worked on features that go well beyound 5 GB's, and some as high as 12GB. There doesn't seem to be a really noticeable difference in performance as the project size increases, unlike something like Final Cut Pro 7 that had major problems if your project came anywhere close to 1GB.

I wonder how Premiere CS6 does in this aspect... 

Just to be super clear, though, I'm talking about Project file size, not amount of media referenced by the project.