Help moving 'Motion Templates' folder for FCP onto an external SSD - MacOS 13.4.1

When typing commands in Terminal, you have to be very careful. A single misplaced character and it doesn’t work.

In this case, there are two mistakes in the typing:

1) The command name is missing.

You are supposed to use “ln” (lowercase ell lowercase enn) but it’s not there. The command starts as

ln -s

but hou just typed

-s

2) Spaces are crucial. They separate things. So you have to take special care when a space is to be part of a name. You need to “escape” them - which is a way to say “this space is part of the name”.

You already did this in part by writing

Motion\ Templates.localized

(notice the backslash before the space)

But there are other spaces. Your external drive has spaces in the name, and they need to be escaped as well.

To conclude my previous post (I was on my iPhone and did not want to accidentally mistype): here are two optional ways to correctly type the command you were trying.

The first version escapes all spaces within the names with a backslash:

cd ~/Movies

ln -s /Volumes/BlueSky\ -\ 6/Motion\ Templates.localized Motion\ Templates.localized

Another way to achieve the same effect is by enclosing each name in double quotes.

cd ~/Movies

ln -s "/Volumes/BlueSky - 6/Motion Templates.localized" "Motion Templates.localized"

I take it a symlink won’t work for this?

You might want to try out SymbolicLinker (there's a link to the github page to download on this page)

https://lifehacker.com/macos-app-of-the-week-symboliclinker-1824289156

This page provides a description (which is hard to come by for this software!) so you can check it out before you decide whether or not you want to download/install it. However, there is an "instruction manual" on the DMG... (I've had it available on my system since version 1.1). Terminal can be very difficult to use. Symbolic Linker makes the task rather easy.

Also, the Movies folder is part of all Mac User accounts and probably should NOT be moved. Motion Templates.localized is not a part of the default user account and therefore is more likely to be relocatable. It seems to me I tried it once upon a time and it worked... but once upon a time might have been OS Sierra...

What surprises me is that you have 100+ GB for Motion Templates! I have 4,027 templates installed and they only require about 16.3GB memory (roughly 4GB per 1000 templates). You seriously have 25,000+ templates???!!