Final Cut – Startup Disk Space

[Steve Eisen]

upgrade to a larger hard drive. They are very inexpensive and easy to do on all Macs including laptops.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Zachary Silver]

I do plan to do that, but my main concern is still about data being recorded onto the drive that I can’t find or stop. Regardless of my hard drive size, won’t that still happen?

[Craig Alan]

How about Audio Capture Scratch?

Maybe your exports are going to system drive?

In the finder you can highlight each of your root folders and command i. See how large each one is and find out what is filling up your drive. How do you know its FCP?

Check in disk utility also. Repair permissions. Run disk warrior. “O” left, I can’t imagine anything will work.

If FCP is giving you a false warning, then trash FCP preferences.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz
; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Mark Petereit]

Download the free program Grand Perspective and use it to scan your system drive. As soon as it finishes the scan it will show you visually where all the files are that are taking up all your space.

[Timi Conley]

I’m having the same problem! I noticed that final cut keeps a folder in Users > Documents > Final Cut Pro Documents on the startup disk, but there really aren’t that many files there, and it isn’t taking up much space. There is another folder there… Users > Movies… mine is empty, but yours may be being used as a default location for movie projects?

Have you figured this out? It’s perplexing. I am trying to export an 80min long movie from an external 1TB drive to another internal drive with almost 30GB free (plenty for the export) and it failed because of space on the startup disk, leaving 0k space left on the disk with no sign of files that I can find! It seems like that should all clear up if an export fails. What is it using it for? My scratch disk is set via preferences to the external 1TB drive. It’s weird… granted my startup was pretty full when I started the export.. maybe 2 or 3GB free- not optimal, I know, but that’s what I tried.

Anybody know what’s going on here?

[Timi Conley]

Using Grand Perspective (thanks Mark!) I located some files in Users > Library > Caches > Temporary Items called ICMMultipassStorage… that seem to be the culprit. Check that. I tried to delete those items (the dates on them made perfect sense, as they corresponded with the export attempts), but they would not empty from the trash because they were “in use”. I quit FCP and then emptied the trash with no prob, freeing up over 8GB.

[David Roth weiss]

[Timi Conley] ” I am trying to export an 80min long movie from an external 1TB drive to another internal drive with almost 30GB free (plenty for the export)”

Clearly there is a big misunderstanding of storage principles on your part Timi.

First, all hard drives must have at least 10% free space, and preferably more, in order to operate properly.

Second, if RAM is being fully utilized, many operations, such as encodes and exports, create a temporary file on disk until the completion of the job, and this too requires free drive space in excess of what you’re calculating.

The bottom line is, hard drives are very cheap these days and you should invest your money in more storage rather than constantly pushing the envelope, which is clearly costing you time and aggravation. 1Tb drives are $60 to $70, and you’re worrying about whether the 30Gb you have left is enough?.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Timi Conley]

David, thanks again for the insights, and point well taken. Believe it or not, in this case the drive in question is an older 152GB startup disk in a 2004 G5 tower, so the 8GB I freed up by deleting those temp files actually made a big difference, securing the 10% free space of which you speak.

Clearly though, I am on a collision course with a purchase of a new external 1TB drive.

Anyway, please forgive the noobishness- I’m actually a single dad musican who makes videos- certainly not a film pro with the time to study the process in depth. I sincerely appreciate the assistance.
All the best-
Timi

Timi
kitetothemoon.com
youtube.com/shurfynepro

[Jeffrey Craine]

Thank you Mr. Timi! I had the same problem you were having and was getting very frustrated. But I found my lost hardrive space just were you said. Users>(name)>Library>Caches>Temporary. I had over 60GB in there.

[Francis Craig]

Hi I know this is such an old article but it really saved me as I too like the above had this problem of: Where were these temporary files being written to on my Startup drive? Despite people here saying that you should have at least 10% of startup disk space free etc in reality this can sometimes not be the case even with the best of disk management. The fact is that temporary files are written to this path in the cache and it’s just as important to know about this as part of good file/disk management. I wonder if FCP X would do similar things for a similar scenario? Any comments anyone?

FCC