How can I share libraries between drives?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Keep the media and cache outside of your library so they are smaller and use them as you would an fcp7 file.

[Scott Witthaus]

Can’t you set up the project/library on the portable drive and just boot library from there? Thats what I do.

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Noam Osband]

Both good answers here. I can do those. I was just wondering if perhaps there was a way to keep everything in the library and just update projects. Thanks for the quick answers!

[David Cooper]

There are few options.

1) Depending on the size of your project and the type of footage you could keep everything on an external.
2) I use dropbox or resilio sync to keep my libraries in sync between computers but keep media external on portable hard drives or copies on each machine.
3) If my footage is too large for the above solutions I convert to proxies using the library settings to ensure all proxies are stored on an external drive. I can then carry this around, edit on whichever system I am using (with dropbox/resilio sync keeping my libraries in sync). I then just need to make sure that when I export, I am using the machine that has access to all of the footage.

Hope this helps.

[Scott Witthaus]

I think it might be easier (and safer) to keep the library intact on a portable drive rather than moving projects about. Just my opinion however.

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Gerret Warner]

Thanks, everyone, for the info.

I’m still learning FCPX, so when I went to move my libraries to dropbox and my media to an external drive I was surprised to see that the first library I was moving was 9GB. I’d thought that the library would be a more manageable size so I could routinely leave all libraries on dropbox as you suggested, but my broadband won’t handle all that traffic.

Then I tried Media/Consolidate and that seemed to fix the problem of too big a library.

But I’ surprised that an otherwise small project I’ve used for learning has a library that is 1.1 GB. Why would it be that large if all original and optimized media are on my external drive?

GW

[Noam Osband]

One guess is render files adding up over time…..Did you delete those with the delete generated library files?

[Jeremy Garchow]

You have to move the cache as well.

[Gerret Warner]

Thanks. I’ll do that.

A related problem is that when I moved libraries into a dropbox folder I later found that they had returned to the Movies folder. How can I move them to dropbox? Or can I?

GW

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would imagine that has to do with how your Dropbox is setup.