• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Huge file buried deep

  Posted by Pete Young on February 7, 2008 at 9:38 pm

  I was running out of space on my hard drive, so I did all of the normal steps to find by space hogs. Found a few, but still had about 135GB of a 240GB hd not accounted for. After much head scratching we found the final cut pro.app file in the “applications” folder was 135GB. We couldn’t delete this file so we re-installed FCP and that took care of it. Of course, this problem happened again a week or so later (this time the .app file was 91GB). Well, we clearly didn’t want to have to re-install FCP every couple of weeks so we sought another alternative. We downloaded a program called “whatsize” that can search you hard drive and find files by size. We unearthed a file with the following path:

  Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/Mac OS/Render Files/Unknown Project/Sequence 1-FIN-00000001

  This file was 91GB. I was unable to navigate to this file in the Finder, but I was able to drag that file out of the Whatsize window and put it in the trash. Empty trash, hard drive is clean. So this seems to be the fix for our problem. My question is: What in the world is going on here? How is this file created and is there a way to avoid this problem in the future? Happen to anyone else?

  Thanks for the help,
  Pete

  Pete Young replied 18 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Arnie Schlissel

  February 7, 2008 at 10:31 pm

  [Pete Young] “Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/Mac OS/Render Files/Unknown Project/Sequence 1-FIN-00000001”

  That’s a render file. It looks like you have your FCP bundle selected as your render directory. That directory should typically be your primary scratch disk.

  Arnie
  Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
  https://www.arniepix.com/blog
• 

  David Roth weiss

  February 7, 2008 at 10:53 pm

  Pete,

  500gb SATA drives are $90… I don’t know how much you charge per hour, but you’ve probably eaten up a lot more than $90.

  David Roth Weiss
  Director/Editor
  David Weiss Productions, Inc.
  Los Angeles

  POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

  A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
• 

  Jeremy Garchow

  February 7, 2008 at 11:05 pm

  Read the part about render files in this article.

  You don’t have to reinstall FCP.

  Jeremy
• 

  Pete Young

  February 7, 2008 at 11:46 pm

  Ah. The “show package contents” – didn’t even think of that! That let me in there to get to those big render files. I think in older versions the render files were in the “Final Cut Pro Documents” folder, which I had already cleaned out.

  Thanks for the quick help!

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