[Ben Balser]

MotionVFX has a dust collection that I use quite often.

[Ben Balser]

FCPX is not ExFat friendly, it causes all sorts of problems. THAT is your problem, right there.

[Ben Balser]

Someone on FCP.co posted this effect they made as an FCPX template. You’d have to search the “Free Plugins and Templates” section there.

[Ben Balser]

I’d do it in Motion. The lights in Motion are super easy to learn/use. Here’s a very old tutorial of mine, not the same effect, but same technique you’d use.

https://www.macprovideo.com/article/video/faking-lighting-for-video-with-motion-5

[Ben Balser]

I’ve never seen a plugin that does that, but there are plenty of free video clips of electric arcs and lightning online, like Pexels. Then you can easily composite into your edit.

https://motionarray.com/learn/final-cut-pro/lightning-effects-in-final-cut-pro/

https://youtu.be/65rO8oK3FNE

[Ben Balser]

Yes, filled out the contact form. Drop me a line, benb at bbalser dot you know what.

[Ben Balser]

No, files do not get physically moved. A hard drive has a directory which lists all files, and where each of those can be found on the drive. Most files are in pieces and live in various different parts of the drive. “Move To Trash” is a GUI thing, the directory simply updates to tag the data that makes up that file as being in a Trash folder (folders are not physical things, just drive directory tags to help the end user organize). Plus, each drive has its own “Trash can” so to speak. So your USB drive doesn’t copy files to your system drive’s trash, it tags it for its own trash directory. (I’m a retired IT engineer, sorry, I tend to rant) Something is seriously wrong here. I use USB thumb drives (the slowest in the world) to move files around, and they copy way faster than this. If your drive was that slow, it’d be too slow to edit on.

Run a test. In an Event, select a file, right-click and Reveal In Finder. Now, select the folder that is that event, copy it (Cmd-C) and then paste it to your system drive (Cmd-V). Tell us how long that takes.

AND since this is so unusual, I’ve never seen this before, I’d highly recommend posting this at FCP.co, also, as they have some folks there who are more technically knowledgable about the inner workings of FCP than most.

[Ben Balser]

Only drive that needs enough free space is the system drive. It uses this space to write temporary working files. But yours is fine.

A 2TB Library is freakin’ HUGE! I’d be sure to turn off background rendering, and don’t use proxies if you don’t really have to. Is this for one massive production?

Yes, reinstall FCP, but FIRST download these!

FCS Remover, will remove ALL FCPX app files, even the ones hidden deep inside the OS that we regular folks don’t know about. https://www.digitalrebellion.com/fcsremover/

I’d also recommend Preference Manager, which makes deleting the pref files way easier, and you don’t have to launch FCPX with two hands. https://www.digitalrebellion.com/fcsremover/

Finally, I highly recommend Final Cut Library Manager, it does lots of really super useful things to help maintain FCPX Libraries. https://www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

I’d also recommend running Disk First Aid on all drives just to be safe.

[Ben Balser]

Ah, so you are doing one at a time, and still having issues?

Most important, be sure your system drive has minimum 20% of its capacity left as free space. Verify that right away!

If deleting renders and preferences doesn’t work, do a reinstall. Something is seriously wrong there. I’d think media being managed/external shouldn’t matter as it’s the same physical process taking place; FCPX tells macOS to move stuff to trash and delete it, then updates its own database. I would thing updating the database would be where issues are occurring. But hey, FCPX can be pretty buggy, so who knows?

I’ve deleted multiple Events in the past, 3 or 4 at a time, no more than maybe 30 pieces of media in each, and it was instantaneous, no issues. But if you are deleting one, and having this problem, yeah, FCPX has a bug, or something is slowing down the OS and drive, and the most common culprit would be the system drive not having enough free space, which can cause all sorts of wacko issues all over the place.

[Ben Balser]

Nope, should be instantaneous, no matter what drive you’re on. First, I’d delete all the render files for that Library, then I’d delete the preference files for FCPX. Relaunch, see what happens.

But since you selected 40 at once, and it’s only showing two being deleted, well, maybe it’s the shear number it can’t handle. It’s not great with huge Libraries. So, as a test, how does it do deleting just one Event at a time? Try deleting 4 Events at a time, then maybe 10, just to test and see if it’s the number of Events being deleted at one time, or what.