FCP bundles location ??

I now have a Mac Studio with 2 tb ssd and the externals are 6 tb drives. My media is linking to the projects.

Currently the bundles folder is on an external drive that is filling up. In 2022 and beyond I am using a second external drive for media. I was wondering if I should leave the bundles file where it is or move it to the second drive or even move to the SSD?  

Any help would be appreciated.

Rich

ETdroneHome wrote:

I now have a Mac Studio with 2 tb ssd and the externals are 6 tb drives. My media is linking to the projects.

Currently the bundles folder is on an external drive that is filling up. In 2022 and beyond I am using a second external drive for media. I was wondering if I should leave the bundles file where it is or move it to the second drive or even move to the SSD?

Any help would be appreciated.

Rich

Hi Rich,

If your external drives are spinning hard drives, you should avoid filling them up beyond around 80%, which is when performance starts to degrade significantly. Your internal SSD should ideally not be filled much more than 1.5 TB. That will leave a bit of room for growth, as well as room for macOS temporary and virtual memory files.

It's usually a good idea to keep your source media stored outside of Library files ("bundles/packages"), especially for larger projects. Also, keeping FCP-related cache/temporary files stored outside of the Library is a common practice. By keeping your Library files "lean" you could keep them on your internal SSD, where they could get backed up by Time Machine (for instance). For clarity, I am using the term project to refer to the entire video endeavor, not to FCP "Projects" (timelines/sequences).

Ideally, you'd want to keep source media on a large and fast external drive, or RAID. Temporary media benefits by being on your fastest drive, to allow for fast writing (and reading). A lot of what constitutes an optimal setup depends on your typical project size (how much source media) and complexity. One example would be to have your "lean" Library (and backups) on your internal SSD, source media on an external RAID (hard drives or SSDs), and cache/temporary files on a very fast SSD or RAIDed set of SSDs. Budget is a big factor, of course. A RAID of 4 to 8 hard disk drives connected via Thunderbolt is very attractive, both in terms of performance (read/write), overall storage capacity, and price (much cheaper than RAIDed SSDs).

For more info, check out these pages from the FCP User Manual:

support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/wh...0e/10.6.2/mac/11.5.1

support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/se...77/10.6.2/mac/11.5.1

If you have anymore questions, please let us know...

Thanks for the info and comments.

Rich