Final Cut Pro editing problems.

1) I have just captured 27 minutes of footage from a mini dv tape onto Final Cut pro and now I can't capture any more as an error comes up saying Capture Scratch drives are full, how do I remove files from the capture scratch drives?

2) The footage I have captured is only 27 minutes long yet the quicktime file size is almost 6gb, considering I need to get about 2 hours of footage onto a disc, It will need to be considerably smaller than 6gb, how do I downsize it?

Where are your capture scratch drives set to? I assume the boot drive at this point? If it is, you need to move the capture scratch to a second drive (or array). You can set where the scratch folders are stored in the FCP System Settings

The footage size is normal. Video editing is not for those with little hard drive space. Projects (especially HD projects) can take 10's of gigabytes, even 100's of gigabytes (I'm sure huge projects with lots of long sources can get upwards of a TB, but that would be a really huge project with a lot of long pieces of source material)

You need a separate disk to act as your scratch disk. I don't know what Mac you have, if you have a Mac Pro, get another internal drive, if you have a late model iMac, Macbook Pro or a Mac Mini get an external drive that has FW800 (earlier models you may need to get a drive chassis with FW400). If you have a newer Macbook or Macbook Air get a USB drive (a USB drive is of last resort as it's the slowest for constant data streams).

Get a drive unit with the fastest drives you can (7200+ RPMs), if using a single drive look for a 1TB+, if using multiple drives in a raid array, get a device that supports a striped array (raid 0) and get as many drives as you need to make up a capacity you can live with depending on the chassis you are populating.

BenDukes said:

1) I have just captured 27 minutes of footage from a mini dv tape onto Final Cut pro and now I can't capture any more as an error comes up saying Capture Scratch drives are full, how do I remove files from the capture scratch drives?

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I had the same problem. It makes no sense that you have to create another folder/scratch disk inside the same hard drive in order to make more space to continue editing. But there you have it. I googled how to create a "scratch disk" and this is the link I used: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/finalcut/scratchdisk/

I think you can increase the size allocated to be your scratch disk under Final Cut Pro's System Preferences menu, but you should keep your footage on a separate hard drive for the most part.