How to use Final Cut pro with external hard drive?

I have to use final cut pro x with an external hard drive

I hope it's safe to say, that's the best way to do it.
Your internal drive has enough work to do without video editing thrashing it around.

I don't know what's going on when you plug it in, though.

Have you checked the drive in "Disk Utility" - Verify Disk or Repair Disk?

craigbuckley wrote:

… whenever I have the hard drive plugged in and Final cut going, my computer goes very slow.…

how connected?

how formatted?

is it already indexed by Spotlight?

I'm with furrytoes:

extHDD is best practice and should speed-UP your setup

btw and completely off-topic:

furrytoes - shouldn't be New Zealand your natural habitat? 😉

craigbuckley wrote:

… I guess I just don't understand the whole process

read the Manual

http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.6/#ver4e2e1bd

basicly:

• de-locate media online WITHIN FCPX, not via a Finder operation

• tell FCPX where it should look for corresponding media ....

craigbuckley wrote:

all the files and events in final cut are still on my internal, so my internal drive is still full.... Do I have to go and delete everything off my internal?

In addition to the excellent advice to keep your media on an external HDD, you need to make sure that your system (boot) drive has a decent amount of free space if you want to have a satisfactory editing experience. Many people recommend not going below 20% free space. That's especially so for the boot drive, but as you fill up the external, its performance will also slow. Ideally, we would have separate media and backup drives,

You don't need to "delete everything". Rather, you first figure out what needs to be moved. You copy those files to the other drive and then verify that all the files you copied are in two locations. At that point you can delete those files from your boot drive.

Good luck.

Russ

Ihad the same problem and found spotlight to be the cause. Because I use the external drive solely for my FCP X files, I excluded it from Spotlight and have had no problem since.

to clear out space you can delete high quality render files from the render folder in you final cut projects. that saves up a lot of space.

So I have all my source media footage in an external now, freeing up 500 gigs if free editing space on my boot drive. But dragging over that media to fcp just enforces my boot drive again once editing begins.

I'm trying to edit 4hrs of 1080/60 go pro footage into 1 hour. 5 failed attempts have make a weeks worth of work worthless. I just don't know what to do next? If I get a terabyte of external, is there a way to make final cut do all it's work using an external? Or do I need to beef up my boot drive? I already have the 750 g... Don't think I can go bigger than a 1t... I just need to know my next step.

What version FCP X are you using?

What do you mean exactly by 5 failed attempts? For example, does FCP crash or do you get an error message? Is it failing to export?

Russ

Having this same question. Clips get dropped and what not. Very frustrating