Massive Library Storage

When I view storage on the Mac, and go into documents, that library shows it takes up 224GB. My Mac hard drive says it has around 130GB free, but I got some error that I couldn’t pull media files into my library to work on a project which prompted me to look into this

My Mac hard drive is 500GB total, 135GB free. This FCP library takes up 224GB according to when I view my system storage. To my knowledge, I try to keep all of my media stored on external hard drives. I think something is occurring that is pulling this media to be stored on my Mac hard drive for some reason, which is why this issue keeps persisting in my opinion. I checked my Library Storage Settings and it says Media In Library, Cache In Library, and it's been that way. How can I consolidate it so the cache is outside the library?

Nevermind, I found the consolidate option. After agreeing to do it, the computer tries to but then says there is not enough disk space and I need to clear some. Again I think my issue is that even though all my media is stored externally, FCP is somehow bringing those files in and copying them to my internal drive. I don't know how it's doing that or how to reverse it

Upon inspecting clips in my projects, they all show to be stored on the external drive. I do drag and drop them into projects, which again may somehow copy their contents onto my internal drive, but I don’t see how nor do I see how to get rid of it. I do have recordings of audio files I use for narration that I believe get saved to the internal drive since they are recorded in FCP, but those do not add up to anywhere near the 224GB number. I just cannot mathematically see where that number comes from or where things need to be removed from to free it up

yes it’s mostly the event folders. Each has the project folders within, as well as original media. It does show the video files in there, but they are all very tiny (like 60 bytes), so that tells me they are just pointers to the actual video files on my external drive, not the entirety of the video files themselves. Most event folders are small-ish (10-100MB) which again indicates they are not holding the full video files. I didn’t do Get Info on every single one, but I can’t imagine where this massive storage is still coming from. Because at an average of 60MB per event folder, that should still only add up to 5-6GB, not 224

I agree, that’s why I’m so puzzled. Usually deleting the generated library files fixes everything and this time it didn’t. I don’t know what is different. I guess I will have to go in and Get Info for every individual folder and find where the big storage is being taken up

No I don't ever use stabilization. I ended up combing through each event folder, and my last few events for whatever reason were storing original media in the library (i.e. copying the files from the external drive to the internal), even though it never used to do that and I didn't change any settings. Either way I was able to relink the files which cleared up pretty much all of the used space. I wish I knew why it changed on its own, but either way hope it's fine now. Thanks for the help

Thanks. Background render has always been off. I just unchecked the create optimized for Multicam. Unfortunately neither fixes the issue I'm having