The more I play with Final Cut Pro X, the more apparent it becomes that the program is built around data/media management. Yesterday, I posted an article about the Sharing inspector, which essentially is a management tool for exported/shared content.
For Events and Projects, Final Cut Pro X has a move feature to move files around to different hard drives. In previous versions, this would require you to go to Finder and manually projects on your own or use the Media Manager to automate things. In Final Cut Pro X, you simply select your Events Library that you want to move then go to File > Move Events.
The beauty of this goes even further since this too runs in the background. You can continue to edit your project as files copy over to another hard drive. As soon as the files are done copying, it will delete the files on the original hard drive and let you work off the new hard drive you copied the files over to.
This same function is also available for projects. Simply select your project window and go to File. What was the Move Events selection magically transformed into the Move Projects option.
With moving projects, you get an added feature of being able to move your referenced events along with it. This makes it really easy to take your work on the go and have somebody else with Final Cut Pro X work on your projects and bring it back to your system to continue more work.
July 31st, 2011 - 9:17 am
great post. very helpful. very cut and to the point. nice site toooo bro! =) good work
July 31st, 2011 - 9:19 am
i recently deleted all the files that were in my final cut X movie. then they disappeared (turned red) from the timeline. oops. now i got the files back and i need to sort of tell final cut.. where the new files are… can i do that? any ideas let me know!
August 5th, 2011 - 10:20 pm
Theoretically yes. In my opinion, it’s not as “intuitive” as the previous versions where you can locate a file manually and reconnect it. Instead, you first have to re-import the media into an event. Then in the projects pane, select your project, but do not open it. Go to your inspector where it should show missing events. Select the modify references button, select the events, and then click okay. I’m not quite sure how that last part works, but I had to use the tool this past week to reconnect media and it simply works. I’d be more comfortable if I knew how it functioned, but in its first re-iteration, it’s more of an automatic tool that I hope gets some attention in the near future.
August 11th, 2011 - 3:06 am
oh. very good. thanks.
September 17th, 2011 - 2:28 am
Great post!
I just found out that you can also just ‘drag and drop’ in the project window, where you see all your harddisks. If you ‘just’ drag and drop, the ‘copy project’ menu will pop up, and if you hold down command, while dragging and dropping, the ”move project’ menu will pop up. The files will be placed in a new ‘final cut projects’ folder on the drive you selected.
September 18th, 2011 - 1:08 am
Thanks for sharing! It’s a good tip. I was aware of the copying trick with drag and drop, but I wasn’t aware about the quick short cut to move a project. Thanks!
November 14th, 2011 - 7:11 am
I cannot select any location other than my internal hard disk….ideas? HELP!
November 14th, 2011 - 8:52 pm
@Kate – I’m not too sure what’s going on in your situation as I’ve never had an issue with my hard drives mounting onto Final Cut Pro X. I typically have my hard drives formatted for Macs so from a theoretical stand point (I haven’t tested these – just thinking out loud), the hard drives that I think won’t read in FCPx would be PC formatted drives (NTFS) or thumb drives (drives formatted in FAT32?). I haven’t tested these, but being that drives formatted in these formats usually have issues or limitations in the Mac operating system, I would guess that would result in issues when trying to read them in FCPx.
NTFS drives will read on Macs, but when you try to write onto them, they will not do anything – just an error. Thumb drives won’t mount onto FCPx (usually formatted in FAT32) have a file size transfer limitation which is probably why FCPx ignores them.
I hope this helps. I’m not sure how well the notification system works on my site so feel free to contact me directly via email at ryanvalle@me.com for further questions
April 22nd, 2012 - 2:03 pm
So when i go to follow these super easy instructions i get no where. After selecting my event, going to file and ask FC to “move” my event the destination drop down menu does not show my external HD. It simply says “no location” and does not allow me to go any further. Has anyone else run into this problem?
May 2nd, 2012 - 10:52 pm
Hi Joe,
My only thought is that you may be faced with hard drive format issues. Do you know if your hard drive is formatted ntfs, fat32, mac journaled, or something else?
-Ryan
May 6th, 2012 - 1:42 am
@Ryan and Aton
Actually, the missing events just happened to me as well, after I deleted mistakenly a FC folder.
You can also reconnect manually all the files. Just select your project (or the clips in your timeline) and click on File/Relink Project Files (or right click to find this command). Then you can select the clips you want to relink in the window and specify a new location (that is of course if you still have the media available).
May 25th, 2012 - 11:44 pm
hello there, I was wondering if there was an option is FCPX to delete all un-used clips in your events…?
June 15th, 2012 - 2:28 pm
Your drive must be formatted as MAC OS Extended
July 4th, 2012 - 7:04 pm
Different but related problem: Outside of FCP X, I manually copied a project folder onto another hard drive, then deleted the original folder. Wrong procedure, learned my lesson, but is there any way to bring the project back into FCP X?
July 4th, 2012 - 10:36 pm
I never had an experience with that, but I see two possible solutions.
1. Copy the copied file back to the original folder and see how FCPx re-detects it
2. Create a new event and manually rebuild the media files. I don’t know how FCPx though will reconnect the media to any associated projects.
September 13th, 2012 - 12:54 am
Hi!
Just wondering a very basic thing:
Is it possible to not have FCPX create folders in users/[user]/Movies if I want to keep my files on my hard drive?
Cheers!
September 17th, 2012 - 5:18 pm
I am trying to copy A TON of projects over to an external hard drive. I was an idiot and built them all on the internal. I have them all organized in folders.
Is there ANY WAY for me to easily transfer all projects over to the external hardrive? I am tempted to just go in and move the “Final Cut Projects” folder (90gigs) over to the hard drive and then hope for the best with re-linking. What would you advise? Surely I am not expected to transfer one project at a time, right? Even THAT wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to wait for the “background task” of transferring to finish before I am allowed to transfer the next project.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
September 17th, 2012 - 8:29 pm
@Justin – I would recommend going the route of just moving files manually within FCPx. While tedious, it just helps ensure that things will remain linked throughout the move process. Yes, it is possible to just use Finder and drag and drop files to the new location, but it’s possible for linking to break. So this means, yes it is expected that you would have to transfer files one by one
However, why do you want to work externally? Internal drives are usually faster than external drives so your performance would be better if you’re running through an internal storage space. If you’re just looking to backup your solution, then ignore this question.
September 17th, 2012 - 8:31 pm
@Per Kopp – Don’t think so. The movies directory is the default storage location for FCPX.
November 5th, 2012 - 2:11 pm
Perhaps you can help me, you seem to know your stuff!
I’ve been importing files into FCPX but leaving them in their original location not having FCPX copy them to the events folder.
All my files remained on an external drive which eventually got full and I copied everything to a new drive. Now FCPX won’t relink the files even if I choose the exact same file. It says the framerates are wrong, a problem reported by many people. So now I’m stuck with a bunch of projects all showing missing files and no way to relink them.
It’s been said that I should have used FCPX to move my files from one drive to another instead of finder. But surely that only seems to work if you move the project as well. I’m not doing that, nor do I want to. I only want to (in fact have) moved the files that are referenced by FCPX.
It seems like a total disaster to me!
November 22nd, 2012 - 6:09 am
@Justin
You can create a folder in the project-window and then collect all your projects in that folder and then move the folder (just before you go home or to bed
…
And if you wonder – you cant rename folders when background tasks is running…
November 27th, 2012 - 7:32 pm
Hi,
I have a same kind of problem as Justin, but no way I can do it within FCP X. My Mac hard drive that had the project “died”: the OS will no longer boot. However, I can access the files via USB connection as a slave drive. What files to I need to move to the new hard drive, and what else is required?
Thanks!
Paul