Did you get one of the new MacBook Pro’s?
If you did, congratulations!
I heard they’re amazing.
I myself didn’t upgrade, because, well…
I don’t really need to.
I have an M1 Mac Mini,
and a 2019 16” MacBook Pro,
so I really can’t justify upgrading for a while.
But that’s neither here nor there.
What I’m going to show you today,
is how you can take your fInal Cut Pro library,
and safely transfer it over to another Mac.
Hey guys, what’s up.
My name is Serge, and welcome back to my channel.
In this video, we’ll take a look at the easiest
and safest method of moving your entire Final Cut Pro library
to another storage location.
This can be used to move your library to edit on a different mac,
or to an external hard drive to save storage space,
because we all now how fast these can grow.
Either way, you will need an external drive for this,
and I strongly recommend using an SSD drive,
especially if you want to use the drive to store your library.
Let’s get started.
First, let’s prep and tidy up our library.
Before you move a library, keep in mind,
that some, or all of your media files,
might not be located in the library you want to move.
Also, if you used Motion to add custom graphics or animations,
that content can also be stored in a different location.
If you want to open this library on another Mac,
you should consolidate all your media and motion content
into the library you want to move.
Select the library you want to move in the media browser,
and over in the inspector,
click Modify Settings for Storage Locations.
In the popup window, set your media and cache to In Library.
Also, if you have Motion content in your projects,
set this to In Library to move that over as well.
Click OK,
and in the Library Properties inspector
click consolidate in the Media, and if necessary Motion Content sections.
When you import your media, or during editing your project,
Final Cut Pro generates files it needs to help it run faster and more seamless.
These can be render files, optimized media files,
or even proxy media files,
and these can take up a ton of space.
If you look in the inspector, in the Cache section,
you can see exactly how much space these files take up.
Before you move your library,
you can safely delete these files to help you save space.
Final Cut Pro will regenerate your render files
next time you open up one of your projects.
For optimized and proxy media files,
if you need to,
you can easily regenerate them once your library is in the new location.
To delete your generated files,
in the Menu bar, click File,
and Delete Generated Library Files.
To save the most space, select all options and click OK.
In my case, I just saved over 300GB of space.
Next, you should prep your external drive.
First, if you have any files on this drive you want to save,
move them over to another storage location.
Next, open the Disk Utility app on your Mac,
and choose View, and All Devices.
Select your external drive in the sidebar, and click the erase button.
From the Scheme dropdown,
elect GUID Partition Map,
and for format select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If you want to, you can also rename your device here.
Click Erase, then Done.
Your drive is now ready for your Final Cut Pro library.
Back in Final Cut Pro, to locate your library file,
select the library in the Libraries sidebar,
then choose File, and Reveal in Finder.
A new Finder window opens with the library selected.
This next step is very important.
Quit Final Cut Pro.
Do not move any files with Final Cut Pro open.
Open another finder window,
navigate to your external drive,
and drag your library file to this window.
This takes care of all your media and your Motion Content.
The last thing we have to deal with, is our plugins.
But, before we do,
I want to take a minute to talk about the sponsor of this video,
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If you’re just moving your library to an external drive,
your plugins are fine where they are.
But, if you want to edit your project on a different Mac,
you also need to move your plugins over.
Depending on where the plugins came from,
you might have to re download them on your new machine,
or if you downloaded your plugins from Envato Elements,
you have a couple options.
You can re-download your plugins from your account page,
or you can just move them over like your library.
Press Shift Command H to open your home folder,
and navigate to Movies,
and Motion Templates.
Command click your Effects, Generators, Titles and Transitions folders,
and press Command C to copy them.
Open another finder window,
select your external drive,
and press Command V to paste these folders.
We now have everything we need to move our library over.
You can now eject your external drive
and move it over to your new Mac.
First, let’s install out third party plugins.
Open your home folder,
and go to Movies, and Motion Templates.
If you don’t see a Motion Templates folder in your Movies folder,
you have to make one.
I’ll leave a link in the video description to a video I did
showing you how to do that.
Open another finder window,
and copy all the contents from your Effects, Generators,
Titles and Transition folders
into the same folders inside Motion Templates.
If you want to keep your library on your external drive to save space,
all you have to do is double click it to open it on your new Mac.
It’s that simple.
If you want to copy your library to the internal drive,
all you have to do is navigate to the location you want to store it in,
and just drag this library file over to there to make a copy.
Eject your external drive,
open up this library,
and skim through it to make sure everything you need is there.
If all looks good,
you can go ahead and delete the library
from your original Mac by simply dragging it to the trash bin.
If you found this video helpful,
let me know by hitting the like button or in the comments below.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.