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Edit Final Cut Pro from iMac’s SSD or from external SSD?

A

Alski99

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 3, 2021
5
0
I have been using Final Cut Pro X for 11 years on the same iMac. Yes, it’s incredibly crazy that I haven’t upgraded sooner. I have just purchased a new 27” iMac i7 with a TB SSD. With the old machine, I was editing from an external firewire drive. With this new iMac, should I do all footage ingesting and editing on the iMac’s SSD, or should I use an external SSD for the Final Cut libraries?
Thanks for any insight!
Al
 
The speed is nice, so internal SSD is great...but, lack of space is usually a big issue. If you have space, it would be good to work on internal. If you don't, you gain space but give up lots of speed working on external HD. If this is a regular workflow and internal it too small, consider an external SSD for workspace, and use the HDs for archives and backups.
 
One should NEVER work from the internal, ALWAYS from any external, for the sake of minimum redundancy alone. If you keep a copy of the original media as well, then you reduce the likelihood of losing everything in one fell swoop to practically 0. Save the FCP backups to the cloud on top of it all, and you're golden. Whether that's a USB3 disk, which is more than enough for even multiple streams of 4K, or an SSD is secondary. An SSD will, of course, load projects faster, render waveforms quicker, etc., but you're obviously spending exponentially more per GB. So it's a question of cost vs. space.
 
Thank you, all, for the informative replies. I really appreciate it.
 
With a 1tb internal drive, you should have enough "working room" to do your editing "on the internal drive".

But... keep completed projects on an external drive.

I would also back up the project at the completion of each session.
 
Alski99 said:
I have been using Final Cut Pro X for 11 years on the same iMac.
Click to expand...

I think Final Cut Pro X was introduced in 2011 so something might be wrong with your math there. :)

Anyway, I used a 1TB external USB 3.0 Samsung T3 for years to edit 1080p video on my 2012 quad-core Mini with no problems. On that old machine, the external SSD clocked around 400MB/sec. I now have a 2018 Mini and a couple 2tb Samsung T7 external SSD's with USB-C which are about twice as fast (over 800MB/sec).

FWIW, the internal SSD's on the newer Macs are much faster however, the 2tb internal SSd on my 2018 Mini is about 2700MB/sec. Have not done much with video recently, although I use other demanding software with very large files.
 
I never edit from an internal drive, whether my Macbook Pro or iMac Pro. For travel, I take 2 externals: an ssd and hdd. I backup my cards on both and if I need to edit I do it on one of the externals and backup on the other. For my main external in the studio I use large (6 to 10 TB) Thunderbolt 3 HDDs for editing and backup. I can't afford the SSDs at that size! My FCPX projects can typically run 3 to 5 TBs. In the past I have relied on LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 3 and their Rugged portable drives. Unfortunately they don't make them since they have changed ownership. I'm going to give the G Drive 10 TB Thunderbolt 3 drive a try next snowstorm.
 
How large is your FireWire drive?

If I was in your situation, I would likely edit from the internal SSD, archive projects to a large external SSD, and then back both up to a new 3.5-inch HDD (if your current external is FireWire, it is likely approaching the end of its service life.) If the projects are especially important, I would add on a third backup drive that would be kept somewhere other than with the computer (e.g., safe, safety deposit box, file resistant cabinet, etc.) or use a cloud backup. (I would make sure the external SSD was large enough where you could also edit from it, should you find you prefer to use an external for editing. You can get very large and very reliable 2-4 TB SATA SSDs for dirt cheap nowadays.)
 
I’m curious if a new G-Technology external hard drive should be used as it comes, formatted HFS+, or if it should be formatted to Mac OS Extended? It won’t be used with a Windows machine.
Thanks.
 
I haven’t connected the drive to a computer, yet. I may have misread the info that came with it. Nevertheless, I believe that my other drives are Mac OS Extended, so I’ll make sure that this new drive is the same.
 
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