Mac's storage is much lower after importing files onto Final Cut X

Hello, all. I've been struggling with low mac storage for a while now. I delete a lot of files almost every other week and yet I always seem to have less than 20GB on my internal drive.


Today, I imported almost 15GB of files from another hard drive onto final cut x on my desktop and when I was done uploading my file onto the external hard drive, I deleted the media on the timeline and on the library.


But I checked my storage and now I have less than 1GB! I checked the folders with the backups and projects and deleted what was on there but no luck, they were barely more than 50MB.


Is there any other hidden folder I should look out for? I can't seem to find any other folder and it's very stressful because my computer is now annoyingly slow.

Be sure you have background rendering turned off in FCPX preferences.
Then delete all render files for your Libraries.
"FCP Library Manager" from ArcticWhitness is highly recommended.

Besides with FCPX.guru said, you can download the free tool OmniDiskSweeper to scan your drive and provide a column-mode list of files/folders sorted by space consumption. This tool is safe and has no ads: www.omnigroup.com/more Starting with Catalina you'll need to grant it full disk access under System Preferences>Privacy & Security. This is typical of many apps under Catalina.

Another cause of space consumption is duplicate files. There are many de-duplication utilities but the one I use is Gemini 2: apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-2-the-dupli...r/id1090488118?mt=12

If you are importing with "copy to library" vs "leave files in place", this will take lots of additional space in the library or whatever storage location is designated by the FCPX library inspector under Storage Location>Modify Settings>Media. If your media type permits it, importing with "leave files in place" can help avoid this. Also placing the cache in a separate folder makes it easier to see at the Finder level how much space that is consuming, also keeps your library small that facilitates file-level backup.

In general, video editing takes a lot of disk space. Beyond the media itself, space is rapidly consumed by cache files, optical flow files, transcoded files, etc. That is something to consider when spec'ing a machine.