Despite what it says in the manual, Final Cut Pro or Express will work fine with an external firewire drive. It won't work quite as fast, and you might lose some real-time effects (i.e. things that might have played on the internal drive will now need to be rendered) but that's a small price to pay for the flexibility, mobility, and low cost of an external firewire drive.
Warning: These observations were made on my 867 mHz G4 laptop, which was my main computer for a while. Since the original install I've upgraded FCP a few times, and upgraded the OS. This all still works perfectly on my machine – but you might run into unforseen problems when recreating this set up. This stuff should all work, but it's not guaranteed 100%. At the worst you would just have to reinstall the software from the original discs though. Please remember – if this all goes bad – it's not my fault!
You need to maximise the empty space on your laptop's hard drive. I had problems capturing to my external firewire drives – there were dropped frames and all kinds of issues that stopped when I set the capture and render scratch discs to the internal hard disc. That meant that I needed to make more room on the laptop's disc. Here are some suggestions on how to do that.
Move the source files for Live Type and Soundtrack to your external drive
1.On the root level your external firewire drive create a folder called "Documents", and inside that create two more folders called "Apple Loops for Soundtrack Pro" and "Live Type". The exact spelling of the names and the location is important.
2.Go to Hard Disc > Library > Audio > Apple Loops > Apple Loops for Soundtrack pro and drag the contents of the folder to the new location on your external drive. You should now have folders called "Apple Loops", "PowerFX Loops" and "Sound Ideas" there.
3.Go to Hard Disc > Library > Application Support > Live Type and drag the folders called "Live Fonts", "Objects" Templates" and "Textures" to the new folder on the external drive.
4.Drag the original folders that you copied to the trash.
5.Open Soundtrack and add the folder you moved the soundtrack loops to on your firewire drive to the search database. Detailed instructions are on page 66 or the user manual which you can access through the "help."
6.Open Live type. There will be no files in the Live Fonts section of the media browser. File > Preferences. In the "Media" window that comes up click on the "+" symbol at the bottom and choose the folder on the external drive where you have just moved your Live Type files. The Live fonts should now appear in the media browser.
7.Check that everything seems to be working
8.Empty the trash
9.Check it works again. If it doesn't you can always copy the files back where they came from.
There’s also a freeware program to move GarageBand called “GarageBand Anywhere”.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22402
Get rid of unnecessary language files
With a standard install of most software there are dozens of files that are used for help or to get the computer to run in other languages. If you don't intend to use your computer in Finnish, Swedish or Traditional Chinese you can delete them. Try Delocalizer. (http://www.bombich.com/software/local.html)
Note that this software has only been tested on OS 10.2 (Jaguar), not on Panther or Tiger. Having said that – it worked fine on my Tiger computers, and removed about 2 GB of useless files on each.
You could also search (cmd-F) for .lproj files and manually delete them.
As I said above – it turns your computer into a pumpkin, it's not my fault.
Search for large files
The biggest culprit in terms of hogging disk space are undeleted video files that you no longer need. To find them, and also a whole lot of other stuff that you forgot to throw away, open a new finder window to the root level of your hard disc. Set the view mode to 'list' and, with the finder active, go to view > Show View Options. In that window click on "Calculate all sizes" Back in the hard disk window click on the 'size' area on the bar at the top of the window so that it shows all the files and folders in order of size. Note that it will take a few moments for it to calculate the size of some folders.
Then look through the largest folders. Is there junk in there that you made, and you can throw away? Some applications that you never intend to use are also huge. Needless to say, if you don't know what it is you probably shouldn't throw it away. Remember that it's not really gone until you empty the trash, and once you empty the trash you can't get it back.
© Phil Davison 2006, all rights reserved.
