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Filling 1TB Drive(s), next move?
So I have just about filled my mirrored 1TB drives on my MacPro with FCP stuff. My questions are:
* Shooting AVCHD my Video Raw Footage folder is now 814 GB. This folder includes my Capture Scratch folder of 451 GB.
* Some of the project folders are old, and can be moved elsewhere to free up space. Archive is ok too.
* Final Cut Pro documents folder is 136 GB. Seems like no big deal.
* My Scratch Disks are set to BOTH my 1TB as detailed above, AND
* an external drive (FW800).
* Question: Is there a better way to tune scratch disks for rendering on other drives? The manual says that I can chain as many scratch disks as I want (up to 12), but I’d rather archive off lesser used stuff. It’s not clear what is the proper way to do that.
* Question: What is the right move to free up space on the mirrored 1TBs?
o Do I simply MOVE the folder I no longer need to the external drives?
o OR do I use some other method?
* Obviously, I’m concerned about losing my references to my original video. I’ve heard enough horror stories with how FCP cannot handle moving the original video that I need a bit of guidance here.Alf
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8 Replies
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Alf,
Video storage has, in just the last few years, become the cheapest part of the entire video editing equation, and it’s certainly much cheaper than your time. When I started, the biggest hard drives were only 2 gigabytes, and they cost $1000 per gigabyte. So, in those days it made sense delete files when possible or to move video around, etc. However, nowadays that’s a total waste of time, especially with all of the various hardware that’s on the market.
As I see it, the biggest problem you’re having now is that you’re buying “one off” pre-manufactured firewire drives. The solution you should consider is getting an enclosure that has four user installed hard drives, such as one of those at the links below.
Enclosures like these will allow you to purchase bare SATA drives, which are much less expensive than the pre-manufactured firewire drive you’re using. Plus, you can buy additional drawers and swap drives around when and if you need to.
This is easy stuff to learn to do for yourself, with no rocket science involved. And, you can use your existing firewire drives as backup devices.
https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2eEN4/
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQX2KIT0GB/
[Alf Hanna] “I’m concerned about losing my references to my original video. I’ve heard enough horror stories with how FCP cannot handle moving the original video that I need a bit of guidance here.
“When moving all media from a project to new drives it’s best to use Media Manager’s Copy function. It moves all all media from a job to a single directory on the new hard drive, and creates a new project which it also copies to the new drive, with everything completely remaining linked. This too is not rocket science, and it’s a good thing for every FCP editor to know how to do.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Thanks David. While I have no problem getting additional drives, and will certainly consider a tower since I filled this one so quickly, the follow up question is this:
Once I get whatever new drive I get, could I easily reassign my *raw* footage out to the external drives, erase the same footage that FCP currently points to and then repoint FCP towards that same file folder structure now out on the external RAID? I assume it’s a one time repoint and that all the rest of the project files stay put. I understand that you are not *supposed* to go moving files around, but since the original AVCHD is file structure based naming a top level folder and dumping the structure into it is simple. The thing I assume will happen is that I’ll get a one time “Media Offline” warning, I’ll point FCP to those files, and things will be back in business. Am I missing something here?
I’d be using FILE>RECONNECT MEDIA I assume.
Alf
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The answer is sometimes relinking is easy, sometimes not. This is why using Media Manager is the preferred method for moving everything in a project.
The way FCP and all NLEs work, is they create a database that references media with lots of different metadata. If something in your metadata confuses the computer, or the media is manually moved to a place the database does not expect it to be, the database can usually, but not always, be pointed to the proper place.
Meanwhile, Media Manager actually does two things, it copies the media and updates the database in one operation, thus taking the unknowns out of the equation.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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In looking at the media manager documentation in FCP, it did not describe this scenario. It seemed like if you wanted to move some pieces of clips, or unused portions of clips. When you open Media Manager, there is a Summary of what’s about to happen. This is VERY confusing, and that screen does not make me comfortable about using it to migrate projects. So I go to the User Manual (since I’m not about to buy yet another supposed Bible of FCP that doesn’t even include basic backup/archive info in it, (Diana Weynard, you are lame), and read through the “What can you do with Media Manager” section. No real covering of what appears to me to be a basic function.
This is not like I haven’t been trying with FCP. I bought Final Cut Pro 7 the Apple Certified manual, and it says to understand Media Manager I need to go buy Final Cut Pro 7 Advanced Editing to get an overview, or go to the FCP User Manual.
sheesh…
Thanks David…
So thanks VERY much for your clear explanation of this. I’ll give it a try.Alf
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Alf,
The FCP manual indeed discusses exactly what I said, below are two paragraphs from page 1581.
You can use the Media Manager for the following media management tasks:
• Copy entire projects or items within projects: You can create a new project file that contains whichever items you select in your original project file, as well as copy all of the corresponding media files.• Move all media files to a single folder on your scratch disk: It’s fairly common to capture media files to more than one folder (or more than one scratch disk) during the course of a project. You can use the Move option in the Media Manager to consolidate all of your project’s media files to a single folder on a single scratch disk, as well as to automatically reconnect all of the clips to their media files in the new location.
Media Manager looks a whole lot more complicated than it really is, and the “copy” function I told you about is non-destructive. The Move function I did not recommend, because it is destructive, in that it actually physically moves the files rather than copying them.
In any case, you just select the sequences and/or media in the FCP browser from which you desire all the media to be copied to you new drive. If you want everything, hit Command-A, which selects all items in the project.
It’s all right in the manual.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Ok, thanks David. As we can probably all agree, written word is sometimes less than perfect in description, and it didn’t seem as clear to me, as a relatively new user to FCP than it did to you. Probably some kind of walk through of what I call “archiving” or “moving” of this would have helped. The notion of what constitutes the “project” is less clear to me than it probably should be. Why? Well, I suppose I could interpret it to mean that out of a single days shoot, I could have multiple “projects” that I could make with that raw footage. If I move the footage using Media Manager, do I still have it assigned to all the possible projects that I have created with it?
My main concern was not moving the ‘project’ as I thought of it, but just the underlying raw footage. I’ll certainly give it a try. Just didn’t want to go try something that ended up screwing up my time that I’ve spent bringing the project to this point.
Thanks again.
Alf
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[Alf Hanna] “My main concern was not moving the ‘project’ as I thought of it, but just the underlying raw footage.”
Of course! That’s always of primary concern, and you should know that I will never recommend a potentially “destructive” operation without fully apprising a user of the consequences.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Hopefully last thought on this issue:
So it appears, despite all I’ve read and not quite understood, that to properly work with project “media” defined as raw video that the log and transfer/capture may be pulled from, jpegs, tiffs, etc. I can perhaps store that on say an external RAID or not RAIDed drive (let’s call it RAW VIDEO), then set the SYSTEM SETTINGS to put VIDEO and AUDIO capture on say my internal RAID array, (and as I have read, I can have many multiple drives that are setup as CAPTURE drives), and VIDEO & AUDIO RENDERING could even best go on their own external drive which probably doesn’t NEED to be RAID, correct? Does it matter if you lose your render files? You could rather easily re-render? Or am I too naive here? I think that what I understand now is that the RAW VIDEO (given that I’m using HD AVCHD) can go somewhere that FCP doesn’t track (correct?), because I specify where it is in the LOG & TRANSFER (it could be on a tape that I’m LOGGING & CAPTURING correct?) and that once I CAPTURE that it gets stored somewhere where it does track…
So my bottom line problem seems to be that I’ve used my internal RAID to store both my RAW footage and my CAPTURED footage, backed my raw footage up to my external 1 TB, AND set it as my secondary SCRATCH disk, so I’m filling up both my internal and external drives more quickly than I would have if I would have not put both on the same drives (!)
Thanks in advance, your help has been great.
Alf
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