Moving fcp 7 files to bigger drive

Is it an external or internal drive you are looking for? Go for the largest you can afford. Keep all of your material there (rushes, project files, secondary material) but always have a back up handy, you never know. Keep in mind that drives become slower as the fill up and the more one goes above 50% of their capacity the more apparent that becomes.

Onto FCP. Once you move your rushes onto a new drive, all clips inside your project will become offline. That is not catastrophic as you can reconnect all media. In fact FCP is not bad with that. Once you point it to the file it is asking for it will sort out the rest; well, almost. You may have to repeat the procedure a couple of times. Changing the scratch settings has no impact on your project. That only "tells" FCP to capture or ingest new material onto the new drive. Better still, name your new drive as the old one and have the exact folder structure in it.

Read about the Media Manager in Final Cut Pro 7:

https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/#chapter=93%26section= 0

Also, if you are working on a deadline, you should also be making a clone of your media disk(s) to use when your disk(s) fails.

MtD

I

Bluemallers wrote:

If I move everything as is, it will have the old capture scratch files from the previous hard drive. Does this matter or will FCP simply create another set of capture scratches for the new drive?

If, for example, your old drive is called FCP scratch and all fcp data is in FCP scratch/Final Cut Pro Documents/, all you need to do is to name your new drive FCP scratch and copy the folder Final Cut Pro Documents onto it. Of course once you do this you need to change the name of the old drive to something else, FCP scratch Old, for example. You can explore Meg's suggestion, which is very elegant but if I am not mistaken you need to repeat it for each an every project you have active. The benefit to using the Media Manager is that you can move your data wherever you want without worrying about labels.

If you can afford it, go for a 3 or 4 TB drive (need I remind you to always have back-ups? clones as Meg suggested) Even 2 TB fills up quite quickly especially if you engage into heavy rendering. Finally try not to go cheap on any drive you buy (within your budget of course). Video editing is a renowned drive killer.

That is ok, the naming i used was only an example to demonstrate that having your new drive setup identically as the old one would work.

You're welcome.

Anytime!