FCPX BACKUP LIBRARY FILES

Where are you seeing these extremely disparate sized files?

The large 850 GB file is probably a Library with lots of render files. Render files can be deleted to free up space and can be re-generated if required.

The small file is most likely a Backup file in your FCP Backup folder. These will have a date/time stamp attached to the original Library name. Normally you do not open and use these. As backup files they only contain a database of your edits and no Media files are contained in them, hence the small size.

Al

How exactly are you backing up? Manually copying library? If by manual backup the large library is probably caused by having render and other cache files. You can either delete generated library files from the File menu before you backup to reduce its size, or work with cache stored outside the library so it’s not part of the library bundle.

Rendering is only for helping with playback inside the application. It consists of precalcalculating the frames instead of doing it on the fly when you hot play. There is never a reason to backup render files. They can generated again later if necessary. In fact unless you are in an older mac, or have a rather complex project that causes playback to not be very smooth, you hardly ever need to render. That is why one is advised to turn “background render” OFF in the preferences. Not needed, and wasting a lot of disk space.

The WHY render files are being auto generated is that the Preferences of FCPro will be set to do this.

It is easily switched off in the FCPro Preference>Playback window:

Uncheck the Background Render box.

In most cases this should be left OFF.

You can manually render sections of any Timeline if smooth playback requires it:

Al

Something doesn’t add up.

You seem to be saying that some backup libraries - those created automatically under “Final Cut Backups” and whose names have a timestamp - go into the hundreds of GB. Did I understand that correctly?

That should never happen - unless you were actively editing with one of these libraries. As Tom said, they should only used if you have a problem with the original library. They only contain the database, and no media.

Are you sure that you were not mistakenly working in FCP on that library that ballooned to hundreds of GB?

Hi(bonjour),

FCP allows to manually emptying all cache, render files and proxies. See the documentation.

But there is an handy utility to maximizing your drive storage with FCP libraries.

Search for Arctic Witness’s Final Cut Library manager. It gives a visual feedback about your library, with render files’s size, optimized media and many option to recover space.

There is a try before you buy option.

https://www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

Michel B.