Working in Final Cut Pro 10.6.5. I am close to finishing a project and my laptop HD is full. Can I Move a project to an external HD and continue working on it? Never had to try this before and can't find anything in preferences to help me out.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.3
If your media is stored inside the library, you can just copy the library to the external drive and work with that library. If the media is external, there are a couple ways you could go about this, but...
Before doing this, you may have lots of drive space you can reclaim by deleting the render cache. First, make sure Background rendering is disabled in FCP Preferences>Playback. Then select the library in the browser, choose File>Delete Generated Library Files... Choose All Render files. You may find that you're reclaimed many GBs of storage. Manage render files in Final Cut Pro - Apple Support
Great! Glad it worked. Remember, if you have Background Rendering enabled, your drive will slowly fill up again. If you can't playback a particular clip or range in real-time because it's effects heavy or there are many angles, etc., you can always manually render just that section. Modify > Render Selection (or press Control-R).
And follow Matti's excellent advice about formatting if you do end up adding an external drive. FCP and Motion can break in unexpected ways if they're working from a drive that is formatted incorrectly.
As terryb said. And format the external drive as APFS (SSD) or MacOS Extended (HDD) because non-Mac formats like exFAT might not work.
terryb - thanks so much this worked great. Deleting unused render files freed up a bunch of space. Much appreciated!
Transferring Final Cut Project to an external HD
