Documentary work-flow questions

Hi All

Documentary workflow questions.  I have edited a feature documentary in 3 sections.  Each section is a separate project.  Recently I created a new event and copied the3 sections into the new event.  But now I want to assemble the 3 sections into one longer documentary “rough cut.”  Over years I’ve accumulated 8 terabytes of media for this documentary production, which is all on one external drive.  Working with so much media,  I worry the drive may be struggling when I hear sounds coming from the drive during editing,.  Any case, what I want to do now is to create a new library and copy into that new library only median actually used in creating the 3 sections (projects).  Also, I want to combine the 3 sections into one longer project which will be the roughcut. 
Can I do that? Do I need to locate this new library on a different hard drive? Please advise.      
Thanks
Rico

I'm assuming all the media is external to the library. Create a new library. Take the event with the three projects in it and drag it into new library. Only the clips used in the projects will be copied over.

Thanks Tom. Is there a way to determine if all the media is external to the library? The library I'm working in now is located on the same external hard drive with all the media.

Only by running a consolidation, but you may not want to do that if your media is in an organized folder structure on your external drive. 

You could also copy the library to another drive. By looking at the library properties for the copied library you can tell if any is on the second drive. It should all show as being on the original drive. 

Rico wrote: ...Is there a way to determine if all the media is external to the library? The library I'm working in now is located on the same external hard drive with all the media.

While FCP will tell you in the library inspector if media is stored on a certain drive, if both media and library are on the same drive it won't differentially tell you if the library contains media. 

However if you delete all cache files from within FCP, and if you aren't using proxies or optimized media, the library should become fairly small. If it's over a few hundred MB it may contain media.

If after doing that if it's not obvious from the small size, you can shut down FCP and move the library bundle to another drive, then double-click on that instance of the library, then within FCP the library inspector should indicate if media is stored within the library, but it won't tell you what files.

The best way is use the 3rd-party tool Final Cut Library Manager, which has an optional feature that exports a .CSV file, listing the pathname of each media file in the library. If any are stored within the library they are easy to spot by the .fcpbundle location.

www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

Re you main media drive making sounds like it's struggling, that can sometimes be misleading. I've heard the same noise and moved an 8TB media tree from a 4-drive spinning RAID-0 array to a 4-drive SSD array, and while it was quieter it didn't make that much performance difference.

In any event you want the library itself off the media drive. The IO pattern to the library database contains many small random IOs which conflict with the large sequential reads typical of media. If you put the library and cache on an SSD, that might be all you need. That could make a bigger improvement than speculatively trying to "de-bulk" your data.

Hi Joema.  Appreciate your detailed feedback.  I wasn't aware of Final Cut Library Manager for Mac.  Seems it's a free download.  I def want to try that option.  Any case, in meanwhile I'll move library to a different hard-drive as well.
Thanks
Rico

To add:
Final Cut constantly accesses the media on a drive. I have no idea how it really works but my guess is that it has to rewrite the data in memory when you change anything in your project. I never noticed this until I was working of an external Raid on a 1 hour program. So a high drive activity is normal, specially when working on long form.

Rico wrote: .. I wasn't aware of Final Cut Library Manager for Mac.  Seems it's a free download.  I def want to try that option...

Only the paid version has the .CSV export feature, but it is very inexpensive and valuable for other tasks.