Not enough disk space to render?!?!?

I am having that same problem, How did you resolve this?

It sounds like his FCE scratch disk setting was set to his internal HD and he reset it to use his external HD. Open FCE, then do *Final Cut Express > System Settings* ... and check or reset your scratch disk setting.

Once you verify the disk that is being used as your FCE scratch disk, use the Finder to verify how much space is still available on the disk.

I did that twice- all was set properly. I was thinking about going through preferences and deleting but I am not totally sure how to do that. Once at the Apple store someone did this for me and it helped with an audio loading problem.

I am using a small panasonic camcorder to load (dv that was shot with a Panasonic dvx100b) and it seems that my settings(preferences?) change when I use this small camcorder to capture. Somehow things seem to get messed up when I use this little camera as a player. I always set the scratch discs before capturing to an external HD with plenty of space. Is there any explanation that would make sense? Could it be a hard drive problem?

Thanks!

Vivian,
What is the exact model of your camera - AG-DVX100B? Or was the video shot on that camera and you are using a different one?

What is the exact make/model of your external hard drive?
How is the external drive formatted - Mac OS Extended, or FAT32? FAT32 would be a problem.
Are you connecting the external hard drive via Firewire or via USB? USB would be a problem.

Camera that recorded the video- Panasonic AG DVX100B and I also used the DVX100A for some of the tapes- this particular tape was recorded on the 100A camera
Camera loading the film to the computer-Panasonic PV-GS80 (camcorder)
Hard Drive- WD My Book 500G WD500E032 format MS DOS FAT32 -volume format MAC OS Extended Journaled
I did a diagnostic on the hard drive and it verified. I used this before- directly loading from the DVX100B and it worked fine.
I am using firewire 400

As a test I tried loading film that was shot on the GS80 and now the capture cannot find the timecode! It plays on the camera but I get a notice- "waiting for timecode"

I also used two different firewires to make sure it was not the wire.

You said " WD My Book 500G WD500E032 format MS DOS FAT32 -volume format MAC OS Extended Journaled "

That doesn't make sense to me. Is the drive formatted as FAT32 or Mac OS Extended? FAT32 will not work with Final Cut. The error message you got is what I'd expect to see if the drive was FAT32 and/or if the camera and external HD are attached at the same time (firewire conflict).

Or do you have 2 partitions on the drive, one formatted as FAT32 and the other as Mac OS Extended?

That is very interesting. There are no partitions. When I run disk utility at the bottom under mount point Format reads MS-DOS File System(FAT32). When I go to RAID it reads Mac OS Extended. Maybe I set it up wrong but it has been working fine so far, I had not used it for several months though prior to this time. And it is possible that I was using imovie for those projects not final cut, if that makes any difference.

The camera and HD are attached by firewire to the computer at the same time so I can use the external HD instead of my internal HD because I have only 4gigs of memory left on my internal.

What do you suggest? Abandon that WD My Book HD?

It sure sounds like your drive is formatted as FAT32.

Regarding the RAID setting, if you did not set up a RAID set, the 'settings' under the RAID button are irrelevant. And anyway, you wouldn't have a RAID set with a FAT32 drive, much less a single FAT32 drive.

I think you have two problems - 1) the drive is not formatted properly - needs to be Mac OS Extended and 2) your cam & external FW drive attached at the same time - I think you have a Firewire conflict between them.

But you have to fix the formatting first. Be sure to back up anything you need to keep because formatting will completely erase the drive.

Finally, not to alarm you, but regarding your internal drive, with only 4GB left you are dangerously close to crashing your system if that drive fills all the way up. You need to get stuff off that drive. You should really keep at least 15% - 20% of your system drive empty at all times. OSX needs that room to operate.

You may have the external set up for the capture scratch, but make sure you also have it set up for the rendering, they are separate...