I was doing some very short video editing last week using iMovie, and could not figure out why I only had 4 Gb of space to import from my DV camera (which shrank to 1.5 after grabbing 10 minutes of content)– until I looked at the info on my MacBookPro– and saw that my 80 Gb hard drive had 78.5 Gb of stuff! Running that low on HD space is not cool, so I began moving old files to my 400 Gb external hard drive.
Like 4 Gb of old photos. Cleaned out a bunch of iTunes songs (I maintain my library on my other laptop). Dumped some un-used apps. Found a pile of original audio files that had been processed into web ready MPs (another 4 Gb). My small iMovie project had gobbled up 18 Gb! There was something like 2.5 Gb of Second Life snapshots– zap! moved to the external drive. More un-needed source imaqges, videos, etc, moved off the main drive.
When all was said and done, I had made about 40 Gb of nice clean space. Good thing, because I have a shiny box of FinalCutStudio to install so I can get around to some serious video editing.
Clean house!
Before you install Final Cut Studio have a look at some of the forums. It is possible to direct LiveType media and Soundtrack loops to be installed on an external drive. You’ll have to plug that drive in when you want to work with those programs (if you do) but it will save GOBS of disk space on your main machine. It’s probably possible to do the same trick with Motion media, but I don’t have the latest Final Cut suite so I don’t know…