This video is brought to you by MacPaw.
Has this every happened to you before?
You’re editing your project,
and you get this message,
warning you about insufficient disk space.
You started off with a reasonable amount of footage,
but then, you look at the size of your
Final Cut Pro library and its huge.
Today, we’ll take a look at why
Final Cut Pro libraries get so big,
and what you can do to
keep it from taking up your entire hard drive.
Hey guys, whats up.
My name is Serge, and welcome back to my channel.
In this video, we’ll take a look
at what you can do before you edit,
during editing,
and after you edit your video
to make sure you don’t run out of hard drive space.
First, let’s take a look at what you can do before you edit.
Before you import your footage into Final Cut Pro,
it’s important to go through your footage,
delete the clips you know you don’t need,
and trim off any unnecessary parts of clips you want to use.
Quicktime works great for this.
Select your clip in Finder, right click on it,
and Open With Quicktime.
Next, from the Menu Bar select Edit, and Trim.
Use the yellow handles at the bottom
to set the start and end points for your clip,
and click the trim button.
Save your trimmed clip.
You can now either delete,
or move your original clip to an external hard drive.
Doing this will both save you hard drive space,
and help you edit faster,
by removing the unnecessary parts of your clip.
And, while you’re cleaning stuff up before you edit,
now is a good time to clean up
all your junk files on your Mac.
There’s a great app for this, called Clean My Mac X.
What it does, is scan your entire hard drive,
and help you remove all the unnecessary junk on your computer.
Simply open up Clean My Mac X and hit the Scan button.
You’ll be amazed at how much unnecessary junk is on your mac,
such as cache files, system junk, outdated entires and more.
Click Run to safely delete all this junk to free up disk space.
Clean My Mac X also helps you easily delete
large Email attachments,
remind you to empty out your trash bins,
fully uninstall unused apps, and so much more.
I’ve been a Clean My Mac user for a long time,
and can highly recommend it.
If this is something you’re interested in,
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details at the end of this video.
After cleaning up all your clips,
and unneeded system junk,
let’s take a look at what you can do when importing media.
When you import your media into Final Cut Pro,
you’re presented two options.
You can either copy your media to library or leave it in place.
If you copy your media to library,
Final Cut Pro basically duplicates your media,
and stores in in its own container.
If you choose to leave files in place,
your media clips are left where they are,
and Final Cut Pro just references them from there.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to both.
If you copy media to library,
after import, you can safely delete your original media,
or move it to an external drive.
Because all your clips are copied,
you never really have to worry about missing media.
The disadvantage here,
is if you want to use your clips in a different app,
the media files can be hard to find.
To get to them, you have to open the
Final Cut Pro library package contents,
and go through a bunch of menus to find your media.
Also, if you don’t remove the original media files after import,
the amount of space your media takes up doubles.
Another option is to leave files in place,
where none of your media gets copied into Final Cut Pro.
The media files remain where they are,
and Final Cut Pro just references them from there.
The advantage here is it’s faster,
because Final Cut Pro doesn’t have to duplicate any media,
and the disk space needed for these files doesn’t change.
A disadvantage to leaving files in place,
is if you move, or re-name one of your files,
Final Cut Pro no longer knows where to find them,
and you end up with a missing media icon.
So, what I suggest doing
when importing media is Copying your media to library,
and after the import is complete,
moving your original media files off your hard drive.
Another option you have when importing media
is creating optimized or proxy media.
When you select one of these options,
Final Cut Pro converts your footage
to a Pro Res or a Pro Res Proxy format
which is much more easier and faster to edit,
especially on older machines.
But because editing in Final Cut Pro is non destructive,
meaning it will not alter your original media,
Final Cut Pro creates new files out of your media,
and especially when you choose optimized media,
these files can be huge.
My suggestion here,
is unless your machine really struggles with your footage,
to save space, uncheck both these boxes.
Next, let’s take a look at what we can do
when editing to save space.
When you have a clip in your timeline,
and alter it in any way,
or add something to it such as a title,
you get these white dots above your clip.
This means Final Cut Pro needs to render this file.
To make editing smoother,
Final Cut Pro creates temporary render files of your edited clips,
making it much less resource intensive to play back these clips.
These render files can also take up a lot of space on your drive.
By default, Final Cut Pro renders your files in the background,
so as soon as you pause editing, background render starts.
To save space, you can disable
background rendering in the preferences window.
From the menu bar select Final Cut Pro and preferences,
and in the Playback tab,
de-select the Background render checkbox.
This can save you a lot of drive space,
but can also cause playback issues
in Final Cut Pro such as freezing and dropped frames.
If you find Final Cut Pro struggling with playback
at a specific part of your timeline,
you can manually render that section.
Select one or more clips in your timeline,
and from the menu bar,
select Modify, and render Selection.
This way, you only render whats needed,
making the render files much smaller.
Once you’re done editing your project,
or want to work on a different project,
you can safely delete all your transcoded media and render files.
These files are temporary, and can easily be re created.
Also, deleting these will not effect
your exported video in any way.
To delete render files from a project,
select the project in the media browser,
and from the Menu bar select File,
and Delete Generated Project Files.
Select which files you wan to delete and click OK.
Doing this will free up a ton of space on your hard drive.
You can also do the same thing to events,
and even your entire library.
Now, back to Clean My Mac X.
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I hope you found this video helpful,
and if you did, do me a favour
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And a huge thank you to MacPaw for sponsoring this video,
and supporting small creators like me.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.