I can't figure out how to get my external hard drive to show up in the list of available drives in final cut pro x. It works just fine in iMovie 11 and every where else on my MacBook pro. The external hard drive I am trying to get to appear is an iomega 1 TB hard drive. Please help as I have a ton of footage on it and don't have the room to move it to my internal drive on the MacBook.
Final cut pro x-OTHER
That should say final cut pro x in the title
Final Cut Pro 8?
Doesn't exist.
Yeah I meant to say x not 8 sorry
Below Event library window is a settings button - looks like a gear
turn on "group events by disk"
Do you see your disk now? Do you see the other disks?
From reading similar threads, and from my own experiences, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that:
* the drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journal), not FAT32, NTFS or other
* the drive must not be currently used as a time machine disk
* (theory) the drive must not have previously been used a time machine disk
From my own experiences, I had 3 externals that worked w/ iMovie 11 but not w/ FCP X. With some experimentation, I was able to confirm the above items.
- one drive was a TM disk, and just wasn't ever going to work. Annoying, but at least an identified issue (or bug)
- one drive was once a TM disk but I'd stopped using it as such. I'd manually deleted the backups on it, but suspect that TM likely leaves invisble files around to identify meta on file lists, exclusions, etc. Showing invisibles in finder listed a plethora of files that I wasn't willing to research. Went into disk utility, formatted as Extended Journaled, and the disk started to appear in project and event windows in FCP X.
- one drive was formatted as NTFS. I use Tuxera to read/write NTFS and this seemingly caused no problems in iMovie. With numerous threads discussing FAT32/NTFS incompatability, I opted to format this disk and then restore my old iMovie events and projects. Again, this resulted in the drive being visible in FCP X.
One note, as mentioned above, in the case of the disk wehere I restored old iMovie events/projects, the disk didn't immediately show in the events window (but did show projects immediately). The solution was to insure that the events window was grouping events by disk. The default layout hid away my external disk until I did this--and once grouped properly, I was able to then import my iMovie events into FCP X successfully.
Good luck...the support for exernal drives (and likely NAS) seems really poorly documented. I lost at least two days to this.
Thanks for the info I will look into this and see what I find out. My external drive does have time machine files on it. I just hope I can delete those and buy a new drive for time machine.
I'm having the same problem. I can't seem to save/create a project in my external hard drive. And my Macbook doesn't have enough space on it.
Apple doesn't ACTUALLY expect people to have to buy another external hard drive for Final Cut Pro X projects, just because they use their existing external hard drive for Time Machine backups, DO THEY?!?
I think the inability to use TM machines is a bit arbitrary as well and a user hindrance.. I can however understand the rationale somewhat-- a FCPX drive could easily eat gobs and gobs of disk space, which would over the course of time rob space that TM could theoretically use, meaning that TM would be able to store potentially a far lesser number of differential backups onto it as well.
So as a software dev, I can somewhat understand the good intentions of insulating the user from accidentally eating away at their disk backups. But this quiet failure was a massive fail--at best, a dialogue box should pop up when attempting to write an event/project to your TM disk warning you of the perils, but still show you the disk and allow you the option to do so as an informed decision.
I just found out you can create another partition of an external hard drive using the Disk Utility, but now I'm not sure whether creating a new partition (for FCPX files and video files) needs me to first erase the entire drive, in which case I'd need another hard drive to back up everything on first (http://www.ehmac.ca/anything-mac/60791-partitioning-time-machine-drive.html).
Anyone know how to add a partition to an external hard drive without erasing Time Machine's stuff on it already?
There can be an offending file on the drive. See my findings here
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3135814?answerId=15519285022#15519285022
I have having the same problem. Here's what worked for me:
Select the hard drive that is not showing up in Finder, and press Cmd-I (Get Info).
In the permissions section in the end, make sure your user has Read/Write permission. Mine had gotten flipped somehow to Read Only. Then restart FCPX and see it fixes your problem.
You are a complete STAR - you have made an old man happy again, this problem has been at me all day & it has taken hours to find your wise words
Hugh
You are the best man......I knew it had to be a simple solution......thank you for posting.
In my case, it simply happened after upgrading to 10.0.5. For an unknown reason, FCPX changed the setting to read only....
Yvon.
Thank you sumitrana! Never thought to check the drive permissions. Works fine now! This drive I am using has a cloned OS X system on it which is the reason the permissions were not set to allow me to use it. I just went in and added myself as a read-write user as you suggested. Great!
Thanks man, I had the same problem with FCP X!! After your post I suddenly remembered that I copied some other files on my external drive. I deleted those files (only left the two FCP folders), and after that it worked fine again.
So it's OK if you're using an USB external drive formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but don't put anything else on it besides the very folders created by FCP!!! It works perfectly!!
Why won't my external hard drive show up in the hard drive list in final cut pro 8?
