In this video, we’ll take a look at how to edit videos in Final Cut Pro off an external hard-drive. Hey guys, what up. My name is Serge, and welcome back to my channel. Now, this is my laptop I edit all my videos
on. It’s a 2015, 15 inch Macbook Pro, and this is the base model. It’s by no mean the most efficient laptop
for editing video, but when I bought it, thats all I could afford. The biggest issue I came across with this is hard-drive space. As you can see, I have the 256 GB solid state drive, and almost half the free space on here is used up by various apps other documents. If I add a Final Cut Pro library to it, the free space I do have left can be used up pretty quickly. This is why I edit all my videos off an external
drive. For the longest time, I’ve been using this Samsung T5 solid state
drive, but a couple moths ago, Sabernet reached out to me and asked if I wanted to try their new Rocket
NANO drive. I’ve been using this thing for a couple
of months now, and it’s been awesome. As you can see, this thing is tiny, even smaller than the Samsung T5 solid state
drive, so extremely portable. Now, using this with an older machine, I don’t quite see the full benefits of the
speed of it, but if you have a newer computer with USB 3 ports, you can see transfer speeds of up to 1000
MB/s. Even on an older machine, using this drive with Final Cut Pro is just
as fast. if not faster than using the internal drive. Plus, having more free space on your computer, should make it run faster overall, especially if you have a mechanical drive. So, with that being said, we’ll first take a look at how to make a
new library on this external drive, and after that, we’ll take a look at how you can move your
existing library from your internal drive to your external
drive. Let’s plug in our external drive, open up Final Cut Pro and get started. To make a new Final Cut Pro library, from the Menu bar, select File, New and Library. Give your library a name, and from the dropdown menu, select your external drive. Click Save. Now, with your new library selected, select File again, and Library Properties. Over in the inspector, click the Modify Settings
button. This is where we set the storage locations for all our media files. For the Media and Cache files, select in Library. This will store all your imported media right inside your library on your external
drive. If you use a lot of Apple Motion content, also change this to In Library to keep all your content in one place. The only thing you want to keep off your external drive is you backups. This way, if something happens to your drive, you still have it backed up in a different
place. Click OK. Now, any media imported into your library, and any projects you make in this library, will be stored on your external drive, and not take up valuable space on your built
in drive. Next, let’s take a look at how to move your existing library to your external drive. Over in my browser, I have another Final Cut
Pro library, and if we select it, over in the inspector, you can see it’s stored on my internal drive. To move this library, we first need to locate it in Finder. Right click on your library in the browser
window, and select Reveal in Finder. Next, quit Final Cut Pro. This step is very important. Do not move any Final Cut Pro files with Final Cut Pro open. Open another Finder window, and select your external drive. Hold down the Command Key, and drag and drop your library to this drive. Finder will copy your library to your external
drive, and delete the original once completed. Once the move is complete, double click on the library to open it in
Final Cut Pro. With your library now on your external drive, we need to manage where the media is stored. With your library selected in the browser, over in the inspector, click the Modify settings
button. Change the location of Media, Motion Content and Cache files to In Library. Click OK. Last step is to consolidate all your media, so it’s stored inside this library. To do this, you can either select File, and Consolidate Library Media, or just click the Consolidate button in the inspector beside Media, and if necessary, Motion Content. Choose whether you want to include your proxy or optimized media, and click OK. All your media, motion content and your projects will be copied to your library, located on your external drive. Using an external state drive with Final Cut
Pro can free up a lot of space on your computer, and make it run much more efficiently. And, if you use a solid state drive, Final Cut Pro will run just as fast, if not faster. The two drives I use, and can strongly recommend, are the Samsung T5 solid state drive, and Sabrent’s Rocket Nano. Both these are great hard drives, and are very reasonably priced. I’ll have them both linked in the description
below. If you enjoyed this video, let me know by hitting the like button, and if you haven’ yet, please subscribe to my channel. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.
