Change Scratch Disks in middle of project?

Ferret Lady

Well-known member
Hey. I am in the middle of a huge project, and getting messsages that my start up disk is full.

I can't believe I did this, but I checked my system preferences in Final Cut Pro and my Scratch Disks are set to my Hard Drive. It has a 700 GB capacity, of which I have about 3 GB's left.

I have an external hard drive as well, which has a capacity of 500 GBs, and about 260 GB's left.

I'm really amazed how quickly I've used up that amount of GB's but I guess that's how it is with video editing when you're capturing hours and hours of tapes.

Anyways, if I change my scratch disks from the hard drive to the external hard drive, will my current project get messed up at all? Also, do you delete your captured scratch disk files after a project is done, or just keep buying more hard drives?????????

thanks guys..
 
are your video files in your capture scratch?
if you delete those your in trouble.

if you move those video files you will have to reconnect.
if you delete your renders, you will just have to Re-render.

When i finish a project i keep everything for a month just in case
a client wants to make any last min. changes. After that i archive
the project and delete all the source footage, keeping only a master.

shawn
 
i assume my video files are in my capture scratch. my project is just footage captured from my camera directly into fcp.

i'm a little confused..

Can i go into the Capture Scratch folder and move those files to my external hard drive, then delete them off my hard drive and just tell FCP to reconnect by finding the files on the external?

bah.. i'm scared i'm gonna lose everything .......
 
Can i go into the Capture Scratch folder and move those files to my external hard drive, then delete them off my hard drive and just tell FCP to reconnect by finding the files on the external?

bah.. i'm scared i'm gonna lose everything .......

Yeah, just move the files. Then verify that they are there. When you delete them off of your forst drive, and re-open FCP it will tell you they are missing. Just have it search for them and it will find them on the external.

If that makes you too nervous, I think you can re-connect each file to the new one before you delete the originals by highlighting them on the browser, then going to file>reconnect media and choosing the new location.
 
wait a sec.. i just use omni disk sweeper to find out what the largest files were on my computer.

i found that altho i have 172 GB in my Capture Scratch folder, there's a whopping 369 GB of files in Motion Documents > Retiming Cache Files.... i guess it's all that optical flow retiming i've been testing out ... ****.. maybe i'll just delete all those and use fcp for slow motion instead...
 
I guess others have said this, but using your boot drive as a media drive makes the app, video files, and OS all competing

Once you get this sorted out, make certain to use a dedicated internal media HDD.
 
oh totally david. i feel like a total idiot for setting it up that way. i think i changed it when i was doing some experimenting with multi clip editing and found that i could play 4 streams at once only if using my internal.. which didnt seem to make sense and probably wasnt the real root of my problem at the time but i totally forgot about it till now.....

i've deleted the Motion cache files and now i'm good to go. but when this project is done, i'll change my scratch disks before i start the next one. Thanks everybody.
 
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