Run Final Cut Pro From An External Hard Drive and Move Projects, Events and Library (2021)

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How to run Final Cut Pro from an external hard drive and move your projects, events and library.

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This video is your ultimate guide for how to fully run Final Cut Pro X from an external hard drive and how to move your projects, events and library. Allowing you to save storage on your Mac and edit your FCP library on different computers! First, what hard drive is best for this? Technically you can use any hard drive, having said that, it is best to get a hard drive with as much storage as possible that is also as fast as possible, all while not breaking the bank. A simple 4tb Hard drive like this is a great place to start, as it strikes a good balance between these attributes. Has plenty of storage for it’s size, uses USB 3 so in reasonably fast and costs around 100 dollars. Of course for maximum performance a portable SSD like the Samsung’s T5 drives are an excellent option. Now that you have your hard drive let’s prep it for final cut pro x. Like with any new hard drive it good to erase it before use, removing any factory data that is added. To do this open disk utility, select your hard drive and click on erase. Rename it, for example FCPX External, format as MAC OS Extended Journaled and select erase. This will only take a second, there we go the hard drive it now ready. Next let’s launch Final Cut Pro X. First, on the left of the screen you can the see list of Libraries, in my case we see the local library, as the name implies this library is stored on my Mac’s internal drive. Now we are going to create a new library for the external drive. To do this, under file select new, then library. From here we can choose the location for this new library, in this case we will choose our external drive. And let’s rename this to External, to make this easy to differentiate, then Press save. We have now created a new final cut library on our external drive. As you can see this appears listed on the left along with our local library. To confirm that all is correctly setup, go to file, then library properties. Find the Storage locations tab and click on Modify settings. A drop down menu will appear, and you want the storage locations of Media and Cache to be set at “In Library” (on the external drive), motion content can remain on the local drive as this takes up very little space and finally backups are currently set to be stored on the local drive, however can also be moved to the external drive to further save space on your local drive, in my case I am going to do this. Then press ok to save changes. Now that your library is all setup and ready, I am going to show you have to access it next time you launch final cut. First make sure your drive in connected then open final cut. Under file, select open library, other and select this specific file from the external hard drive. Let’s test this by importing some footage. As you can see the footage is displayed in our event under the external library. Let’s create a new project, we can now move the footage to the timeline and edit completely off the external hard drive. Finally, I am going to show you where and how this data is stored on the external drive. If we open a new finder window and select the external drive, you will see one file named External, this file represents the new final cut library. To access it, right click and select show package contents. Be careful not to move or rename any files, as this will damage the library (however viewing them is fine). In this event file you can see folders for Analysis files, Projects, Original media and Render files. In fact inside the Original media folder you will find the clip we just imported. Thus showing that the new Final Cut Pro library is running and completely stored on the external drive. Allowing you to save storage on you local drive.

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Thank you for watching, let me know if you have any questions.
Dion Schuddeboom
DionVideoProductions





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