Final Cut Pro is my favorite application because I learn something new almost every day. The app. does something, though, I’m not sure how to manage. It writes files to my scratch disk and then leaves them there.
Once every two weeks or so, I go into my Final Cut Pro Documents folder and delete, delete, delete. It ads up to over 100GB every two weeks.
- When I delete something from FCP, why do the files associated with it stick around?
- Is there a setting I should change in preferences?
- Will I ever learn all I need to learn about FCP (rhetorical)?
4 Comments
Right/ctrl click on said item, sellect “Make offline”. In a popup, sellect “Delete from disk”, hit OK, confirm, enjoy.
I use Final Cut express because I have a MacBook and not a MacBook Pro. It’s a great program. I just started using it, so I have no answer for you, but just wanted to express some Final Cut solidarity.
Hey Neal!
The FCP keeps the cache files around because in many cases it works directly from those cache files. So keeping the cache files around speeds up editing if you ever come back to the project again. Otherwise, FCP will have those horrible red lines and have to rerender, sometimes. Of course it depends on your codec.
Because you use lower-3rds and a lot of neat overlays, those are all rendered and saved into the cache folder. You’ll notice that if you go back to an older episode’s project file, the effects will probably be unrendered (i.e. red line over parts of the video) because you deleted the original cache files. This is okay because you can always rerender those files as long as you have the original video source. Think of cache as a working copy.
At the end of the day, it’s just a tradeoff between space and convenience. I would definitely delete caches after a week and just archive source video, project files, and extra files like episode-specific images.
And now I’m curious, what is Geekbrief’s backup strategy? Obviously you use the lovely Drobo, but do you guys archive to tape? Do you keep every episode? Or do you archive h.264 versions of the episodes and delete the original footage? There are TONS of options and it’s all about what works for you.
In your documents folder? It might be your autosave vault. It can get really big depending on your settings. Check under the Final Cut Pro menu/User Preferences/General. It’s at the bottom left. Throttle it down a bit and see if that helps.
To manage your timeline render files go to Tools/Render Manager. You can delete renders for specific timelines or whole groups of stuff.
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