Hey peeps! I'm in real need of some help. Any help would be appreciated! I'm loosing my mind trying to figure this out. I've looked everywhere but in all honestly I have no idea what I am searching for or anything - I'm just getting no results. It all seems to get too confusing.

I've been using editing programs for many years but FCP X is just confusing me to the point of insanity lol

First of all - I started editing a project with FCP X and i noticed that it was taking up A LOT of space on my hard drive - I have no idea how or why, but FCP X seems to create a folder and then it seems to duplicate all my work into another folder on my hard drive - so now I have all my media videos which total up to around 500gb duplicated in the events folder that FCP X creates - and my harddrive is now around 1000gb - how is this possible and how do i stop this? Is there a way to 'copy' the files so that it doesn't create a copy of the original media into that folder?

Secondly, because of this - I now cannot work in FCP X because its used up all my harddrive space I get an error message saying I need to delete some files - but I cannot delete the files because I need those video clips and I cant delete the media from the other folder because it seems to disappear from the time line and then when i re- add the media it just creates another copy back into the FCP events folder! It's doing my nut in.

Honestly, is there something that I am doing wrong? I have never had this much hassle/trouble editing before - I just cant seem to get my head around it. I have tried deleting everything from FCP and trying a different hard-drive and starting again trying to copy the media and it looks like it's copied the media and the files in the FCP events folder have a little arrow on them which I assume that means they have been copied rather than duplicated but the space is still quite high. I am at my wits end. I cant afford more space and with 500gb of media and 1000gb harddrive I assumed this would be enough space to edit my project - arghhh! Can i connected another harddrive just to save the FCP events to or something?

PLEASE ANY HELP VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

The little arrow on the files means it's an alias pointing to your source file. It should be very small in size so that shouldn't be causing you problems.

Do you have background rendering turned on. If so every time you make any changes, colour work, effects, transitions etc. FCPX will create render files that will be filling up your hard drive further, you'll end up with many that aren't even being used. If your working with long gop source files it will also be creating render files to all used clips regardless of effects etc.

If this is the case you can turn it off and delete your render files to free up hard drive space. If your specs are high enough you'll be able to edit the long gop video and manually create render files for anything that might need it. If not you can optimise your media, this will create duplicates of your source files with the ProRes 422 codec, you can then remove your original files, either delete them if your happy to or back them up to a different drive.

Hi NocoDave thanks for replying. I'm new to FCP X and I'm not entirely sure how to do the stuff you've explained. Could you elaborate please? Sorry to be such a newbie - I wish it was simpler

Do the Ripple Training core FCP X course. Seriously. It will put you so far ahead it's not funny. These are such basic questions. I have to really recommend this training before going further.

http://www.rippletraining.com/categories/final-cut-studio-courses/final-cut-pro-products/final-cut-pro-10-core-training.html