Tong Family

OK, I don’t completely understand what is going on with Final Cut Pro, but I have eight videos of about an hour each and I keep running into the dreaded “Disk Full” messages. So here is what I’ve done:

1. Make sure that Render is set to 422 and not 4444 which I had before. The latter generates truly huge files, the former generates about 1GB per second which is pretty ok if you have a 2TB drive.
2. However, as I was color-grading a set of videos, I suddenly had the same problem, each video of 30-50 minutes was generating 250GB of data. It is very obscure what is going on, but by browsing the FCP Bundle and looking at Files, I see that their Render Files > High-Quality Media was 200GB each and that each frame was fully exploded and taking 1GB each or even 2GB. So something I’m doing is causing it to generate huge files.
3. I could see this because as I scrolled back and forth through the images, Final Cut got *really* *really* slow like 5 minutes for it to respond to a move through the timeline.
4. Now the help says that if you select the file and choose File > Delete Generated Project Files > Render Files it should get rid of them, but I’m not seeing that at all, they are still there. And you can do the same thing with Clips and Events or if you want to do the whole thing. Neither of these seemed to help with the offending project, clip, or event.
5. Finally, I had to use the nuclear option. Which was select the entire library and choose File > Deleted Generate Library Files. This takes forever and means I can’t figure out why this is happening (but I suspect the color grading causes it). But it did work to reduce the file size from 700GB to 40GB. Note there is option to say “Unused Render only” which I’ll try next time.