Had 30gb of space left on my hard drive, imported a couple hours of clips, and now I have none.

Question

Had 30gb of space left on my hard drive, imported a couple hours of clips, and now I have none.

Exactly what the title says. I placed several gigs worth of footage into FCP X, put them in the timeline, and then left my computer overnight. I wake up, and FCP alerts me that I've run out of space on my hard drive (I'm leaving out some details but it was along those lines). For the life of me, I can not figure out how to find out what has used up dozens of gigs of space and where the responsible files are located.

Does anyone know why this happened, how I can get my storage back, and how to prevent this from happening again (of possible at all)? I am completely new with this software, forgive me if it's incredibly obvious. I just did not expect that much hard drive space to be taken up.

Final Cut Pro X, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Oct 20, 2012 4:41 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 20, 2012 4:55 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

Ahh, that's easy!

1: You import several GB of movies. What type?

2: You checked the Create optimized and/or Proxy media..!

Look in the Event folder for the imported event. Is there a Transcoded Media folder? I bet that is were your HD space has gone.. ;-)

And now, 'thisprogramisNOTreallyterrible'! The users might not know what they do, though... 😉

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Oct 20, 2012 4:59 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

30G is very little space on anything but the smallest drives. For most drives a minimum of 10% is recommended. Two hours of video is a huge amount. It depends on the exact format specs, but in QuickTime, unless it's heavily compressed, it's going to take more space on that drive than is safe to use.

If you imported video the files are most likely in the Original Media folder. If you did effects or anything that required rendering, there will be render files most likely in the project folder.

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Answer 3

Oct 20, 2012 5:09 PM in response to Jakob Peterhänsel

All of them are .m4vs. Also, pardon my ignorance, but where would I find the Event folder, or Transcoded Media folder? To avoid "this" happening again, do I need to uncheck "create optimized and/or proxy media"?

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Answer 4

Oct 20, 2012 5:13 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

FCPX folders are in your ~/Movies folder!

Or in the root of external drives, if stored there (but you did not in this case, I guess)

Yes, you would like to uncheck that option, if you don't have the space for it.. 🙂

And you can actually just delete it again, if you like. You can always re-encode the video if you like, or get more HD space. Remember to quit FCPX before you delete the Optimized video..

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Answer 5

Oct 20, 2012 5:16 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

I have close to 10gbs of .m4v video (not all of it was imported), so I don't understand why it more than tripled when I placed it in FCP.

I did not add any effects to the clips, only imported the video (which was already on my HD). I'm not entirely sure which Original Media folder you are referring to. How would I find this, and is it what's taken up my space? Is there a way to prevent me from this happening when I import again?

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Answer 6

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Oct 20, 2012 5:18 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

.m4v is not a supported framework unless rewrapped to QuickTime. If you place two hours of media into an FCP timeline in that format, everything will have to be rendered, which means into ProRes, a high resolution production format, way larger than the amount of drive space you have available.

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Answer 7

Oct 20, 2012 5:20 PM in response to Jakob Peterhänsel

Thanks mate, I found the culprit. It was the render files in my project folder. I just don't understand why the clips had to render, when all I did was place them in the timeline and cut a couple of them.

What exactly is the consequence for unchecking that option, by the way?

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Answer 8

Oct 20, 2012 5:22 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

So what steps should I take to avoid having exhorbitant amounts of HD space taken up when I choose to edit my video?

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Answer 9

Oct 20, 2012 5:28 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

thisprogramisreallyterrible wrote:

So what steps should I take to avoid having exhorbitant amounts of HD space taken up when I choose to edit my video?

You can't. Editing video in HD simply takes up huge amounts of harddrive spase.. 😐

If you need to work on it on a laptop, you can have your event on an external drive, and create proxy files, and then only move that part over, but it's a little more work..

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Answer 10

Oct 20, 2012 5:35 PM in response to Jakob Peterhänsel

Since we're on the subject. The original files I had were .mts but were unrecognized by FCP 7. So I converted them all to .m4v via Handbreak and for some reason FCP still didn't recognize some of them... so I imported them into FCP X and all seemed fine. Would there be a difference if I edited with original .mts clips from the hard drive. Also, why would creating proxy files take mroe work?

I'm curious though, why should videos that are merely imported from my computer's hard drive take up so much more space?

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Answer 11

Oct 20, 2012 5:45 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

MTS files is a MPEG2 Stream format, that is not suited for NLE editing. Transcoding to a suitable format, like ProRes, makes the editor able to work.

ProRes is a better codec, but take up more space - as it's able to store much better video information.

My small workarea on my 2TB HD is using ~500GB for Events and ~150GB for Projects..

FCPX can import(transcode) MTS files, if they are still part of the original AVCHD filestructure.

It would be more work to work on a Proxy version, if you create the event on an external drive and move the event to your internal drive, with only the proxy version...

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Answer 12

Oct 20, 2012 6:32 PM in response to Jakob Peterhänsel

Okay... I guess all I have left to ask is, how will I be able to edit my footage with the little space (relatively) that I have on my computer? 😕

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Answer 13

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Oct 20, 2012 11:49 PM in response to thisprogramisreallyterrible

You can't. You're going to need to get a separate dedicated hard drive for your media.

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