- If you edit inside of
Final Cut Pro 10 like I do, then you know that the libraries can have ginormous file sizes and it fills up your computer really fast and then starts to slow everything down. So then you have to buy a bunch of these external hard drives. And then honestly it can
get kind of expensive when you end up buying a bunch of those. So today I'm gonna show you how I turned my 700 gigabyte
Final Cut Pro 10 library into just 33 gigabytes. And I didn't delete any of
the videos, any of the assets, I didn't delete the project, none of that. But I found this little trick that I had to share with you guys 'cause it saved me so much
space and in return money because I don't need to
buy a bunch of these now. And so I'm excited to jump into this video to save you some space on your computer. - [Narrator] You gotta just press record. - My name is Nolan Molt with Think Media and I'm excited to help
you save a bunch of space on your computer. I know this is gonna help you out a lot and I'm also gonna walk you through me starting a brand new video project and so I have my SD card right here. I'm gonna plug into the computer, I'm gonna get everything ready as if I were about to edit my video. The other thing I'm gonna
be using in this video is a Samsung T5 hard drive, and I'm gonna be using
the two terabyte version and that runs right around $300. Sometimes it's 320,
but I just saw for 299. So check the links in the description if you wanna pick one up, but basically we are gonna
be editing everything on this hard drive. So nothing is going to go
on to my actual computer. We are gonna edit everything off that and if you want to learn
more about this hard drive and my kind of final thoughts on it, I have a video that I released where you can click on
the screen right now to go and watch that video. The other thing we are going to be using is an external hard drive and it is a Seagate eight
terabyte external hard drive. That runs at about $142. And so it's a lot of space. It is not fast enough to edit off of and that's why it's so much cheaper, but really if you just get one of those, and you get one of these, you're gonna be set for a while, especially with the trick
that I'm gonna show you at the end of this video, because really, we're not gonna be sending a whole bunch of files onto
that eight terabyte hard drive. And this is the trick that I just learned, I'm gonna share with you guys, but let's start from the very beginning. Step one is gonna be very important for keeping everything organized, and that is to create a
new folder for our project. So I'm actually gonna go into my finder and if I go to my documents, I have a preset right here
called File Management Template. I'm gonna hit Command + C to copy that. And then I am gonna open up
my hard drive right here, and then I'm gonna hit
Command + V to paste that. So right here I'm gonna replace
File Management Template with the name of my project. And this is actually the
video I was talking about the T5 review video, so I'm just gonna call it T5 Review Video and I'm gonna save that. And in here you can see I
already have some folders and you can make these if you like, inside Videos I have A-Roll
and B-Roll sub-folders. I also have sounds,
music and sound effects as well as other assets. This might be maybe a graphic that pops up something like that. And then final output is where I'm gonna render
and export my final video. Now that that's taken care of step two is to copy and organize our files onto our hard drive. So I have my SD card right here, I'm gonna go ahead and plug this in. So right here I have all these videos are gonna be the videos
for my T5 review video, but I already know because of
the color on the background that these are gonna be my B-Roll videos, and then up top, the two above this, these are gonna be my A-Roll. So I'm gonna copy that over to A-Roll. And you can see here
that it is now copying, it's gonna take about two minutes. And that's one of the amazing
things about the Samsung T5 is everything happens really, really fast. While that's happening, I'm gonna go ahead and
select all my B-Roll as well and I am going copy that
over into my B-Roll folder. This is gonna take just a couple minutes, but if you have any other
like screen recordings or any other footage maybe
from your phone that you need, get that onto here, organize it, copy it into the correct folder. While this is happening, we're actually gonna go to step three, which is to create our final cut library inside of the Samsung T5 or whatever external
hard drive that you have. You can see right here that
I opened up Final Cut Pro and it already made a
brand new library for me, but I'm actually not going to use that. I'm going to make a new library by going to File, New, Library. And then you wanna make sure that the correct SSD is selected. So mine is TM_t5_3. And I want to go in here and I'm just gonna have it be right here, we're just gonna title it the same thing. So this is T5 Review Video. Once that's done, I can actually check this
by minimizing Final Cut Pro and if I go back to these folders, you can see right here
that I have this library now on to my T5. So instead of having your library live on your actual computer,
maybe in the movies folder, that's where Final Cut Pro
just automatically sends it, it's gonna store a lot like I talked about 700 gigabytes was one of my libraries. Sometimes around 100 gigs, just definitely depends on how much video and the file size that you have. But it's gonna store up so much space if you let it live on your computer. So the best way to do this is to actually have that
library live on the T5 because that way this thing is starting
to fill up in space, not your actual computer. And now that that's done,
we can go to step four, which is to import our
files into Final Cut Pro. Now there's one really important step that I'm gonna show you right now but if we go to our event
and we hit Import Media, we are going to want
to open up our TM_t5_3. So you can actually just
select T5 Review Video folder and it will import
everything inside of it. So maybe if you already
had some sounds or music, it will import that as well. But here is the important part, is you wanna make sure that
you hit Leave files in place because we already have
everything on to the drive. We don't need to copy
these videos over again, we are going to leave the files in place. That's gonna save us a little bit of room. Now I'll hit Import selected. And you can see here it literally
just took a few seconds, because nothing is like truly
importing into Final Cut Pro, because you have your videos on the drive, you have your library on the drive. Typically the videos are
then copied to the library, but we are just going to
kinda create our own folders like we did, and that's gonna help save
a little bit of space. One cool thing here is if
you click down on this, you're gonna see some tags and this is from the
folders that we created. So if we hit A-Roll, we're
just gonna see our A-Roll, if we hit B-Roll, we're
doing gonna see our B-Roll. So that's a cool little trick you can do to organize your footage because Final Cut Pro knows
that you put those videos in specific folders and so it tags it for you. One other important step here is if you're gonna import
any new media like music, for example, I always edit my video and then I go and find
some music and import that, what you wanna do is download your music, typically it goes straight
into your downloads on the computer, and then you wanna copy that into the correct folder on the T5, and then import it back
into Final Cut Pro 10. Once you've done that, you can delete it off of your
computer to save that space. Now this next step I'm
gonna share with you is how I was able to shrink my Final Cut Pro library size so much, but first, let me know what you edit on, do you edit on something like this or you edit straight onto
your laptop or computer? Let me know in the comments below. All right, now I'm actually
gonna open up a new library to show you guys exactly
how to shrink these files because once you start editing, I haven't really started this edit yet, but once you do start editing, you're gonna see that
library just skyrocket and the gigabytes and the
file size is gonna be huge. But I'm gonna show you
right now how to do that. But let me open up a
different library first. So in this project called Film
Yourself in 10 Easy Steps, this was a video that
I did for Think Media. And in here, you can see
that I have my library, and it is 377 gigabytes. It's absolutely ridiculous how big it is. But I'm gonna show you how
to shrink that number down. So let's open up this library. So if we select on the
library, and we look over here, we can see again, it's 377.76 gigabytes. And so before we send this
to the external hard drive, we want to shrink that number, that's gonna save us a lot of
space, save us a lot of money. And so that is step number five, which is delete the render files. Now after doing a little bit of research, I found that this number is so big because it's storing all of render files. And basically what this means is when you're editing a video, and let's say, oh, right here we can see, there are these dots above the timeline. This is what needs to
be rendered right now. So you can see all this
stuff needs to be rendered. And as that is rendered, it's basically creating
more space in that library. So as you can see, this
is starting to render, but it's actually going to
increase our library space as that happens, and it makes everything
easier to play back. But we don't need that when
we're done editing the project. And you can see now the number is going up because it is starting to render and we're not editing this project, so let's go ahead and
delete our render files. How we do that is we select the library and then we go up to File and we want to go to Delete
Generated Library Files. Right here, you're gonna have some options to delete render files. And now there's two options, one is to delete the unused only. So any footage that you were editing that is not now in that final project, it's gonna delete those render files. And it can keep all the render files from the project that
you've already edited. However, I'm probably never
gonna touch this project again. And I wanna save more space. And so what I can do is select All, and this is gonna delete
all the render files. And that's okay, it's not
gonna delete any video, it's not gonna delete any of the assets. It's just deleting kind
of like the mock ups that Final Cut makes
in order to run faster, and to playback your video quicker. One other thing to note is that you can still edit this project. So let's say we delete
all our render files, we throw it onto our hard drive, but then we bring it back and we want to make some more edits. It's totally okay. It just needs to re-render. Now, of course, that is going
to then take up more space. But when you're completely
done with the project, there's so many projects that I edit that I just don't ever touch again, and so this is my new method is I just delete all the render files because if I ever do need to
go back, I definitely can, and I can re-render everything. So I'm gonna hit OK. And we're gonna see this
378.9 gigabyte file drop. But first we need to go to
our event so it can refresh. And then we are gonna
hit the library again. And look at this, it
is less than a gigabyte it is 532.7 megabytes. So I'm gonna go ahead and
close out Final Cut Pro. Because I have auto-render on after about five seconds of
not moving the mouse around, it's going to start rendering again, and that's going to add more file size. And you can actually turn that
off and mess the settings, but I'm gonna go ahead and
just close down Final Cut Pro. Now that I've closed down Final Cut Pro, we can see here in the
Film Yourself Folder that this library is
less than one gigabyte, which is amazing. So from here, we have step number six, which is to copy the entire folder onto your external hard drive. So I'm just gonna go
ahead and grab this folder and drag it over my external hard drive. And this is going to start to copy. And the entire project in its entirety is gonna be 76 gigabytes rather than, you know, 400 plus gigabytes. So just doing that, you know,
saved us over 300 gigabytes which is amazing. And then why you see the 76 gigabytes is from the original raw video that is inside of that folder under Video. I hope you guys enjoyed that video. If you wanna click on the screen right now you can watch the Samsung
T5 hard drive review that I just did. And so check that out and I'll see you guys in the next video. (upbeat music)
