Clean those Adobe Media Cache Files

the Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

And reclaim some drive space in the process

I learned something today about Adobe Premiere Pro that I was unaware of. The application creates a media cache when it imports media and that media cache seems to default to the system drive in the user Library folder. This cache can balloon in size over a period of time as I found out when cleaning up a drive. But it can be easily cleaned and relocated.

While cleaning and preparing my system drive for a backup recently I was looking through the great visual disk management application DaisyDisk and I saw a big chunk of files on my boot drive in an Adobe folder called Media Cache Files.

I’m diligent not to place media on a boot drive, and most certainly not in a Library folder, but a little research (and some help from Twitter) revealed this to be a place where Adobe Premiere Pro writes previews to greatly improve “performance for previews, because the video and audio items do not need to be reprocessed for each preview.” Okay. They are also accessed by other Adobe applications as well. If you’ve ever noticed the little conform progress bar that pops up in the corner of a PPro timeline when you import new media you’ve seen this cache at work, at least I’m guess that’s when it writes those file.

I dug into the Library folder and there it was, nearly 30 gigs: read more...