Confused about Scratch Disc usage

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
When I am home I have an external hard drive that I use with my Macbook pro for FCP editing. I just recently bought a Lacie 250 gb rugged drive for when I am on the go. Well today I tried run FCP with the "rugged" Lacie attached and it kept saying my main external drive (home) was missing. So I added the "rugged" drive to the list of scratch discs in the settings. After I clicked okay it went right back to say ing my main drive was missing! Why can't FCP identify with whatever drive is hooked up and use that?

Needless to say I never got FCP to run off the other external hard drive.
 
You have to go into your settings and tell FCP to use that drive as the scratch disk, especially if you are using that drive for the first time and have no existing projects that have used it. The "missing" error that you get should also have an option to "Reset Scratch Disks," which will allow you to manually point FCP to the new drive.
 
That's what I did from the get go. I went into my settings pulled up the tab for scratch discs and added the new drive to the list by clicking SET. Now as far as I know, the only way FCP will recognize the new drive is I have to CLEAR out the main drive from the list which I think is stupid being as though I can add a slew of scratch discs to the list. You'd think it would just go down the list and use whatever is available for the scratch disc but I guess it doesn't work like that.
 
the best method is to only have one scratch disk on the list. otherwise final cut will scatter your files everywhere. i change my scratch disk with every project. i create a folder for each project and make that folder the scratch disk. fcp will create it's own folders within that folder such as capture scratch, render, etc.

this keeps your project neatly organized into a single folder. makes it easy to hand off a project to another editor or the client. copy one folder and that's it. otherwise you end up with files all over the place.

no big deal to reset scratch disk with every project. takes 2 seconds.
 
cheezweezl said:
i change my scratch disk with every project. i create a folder for each project and make that folder the scratch disk. fcp will create it's own folders within that folder such as capture scratch, render, etc.

this keeps your project neatly organized into a single folder. makes it easy to hand off a project to another editor or the client. copy one folder and that's it. otherwise you end up with files all over the place.

no big deal to reset scratch disk with every project. takes 2 seconds.
Click to expand...

My workflow, too. I frequently move from desktop to laptop and from RAID/NAS to external drive, and it keeps everything simple.
 
That is my workflow as well.
DVXShooter. That is not a list of scratch disks you are making. What you are doing is telling FCP to use the lacie rugged after your home drive is full. You can't set up multiple scratch disks as your main scratch disk. So like C2V said "You need to RESET your scratchdisk" not just add to the list.
 
Ditto on the above. To avoid chaos you should always start by specifying drive paths for a new project. If it gets worked on on two different systems (desktop and laptop for example) it's best to use the same external drive for both, which will be completely transparent. If you can't, then specify a particular drive for each and copy/update files/paths to the other as you go back and forth. Anything else will eventually drive you nuts, and may well result in unrecoverable work.

Just like in DAWs (like Pro Tools, where I earn my living), file (mis)management is one of the easiest ways to buy yourself a ticket to hell...
 
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