I have a problem that hasn't happened to me before. It's been about three months since I've used Final Cut Pro to capture raw material from miniDV tape.

I recently started a new project file, and set the scratch discs to my external hard drive. The problem is ... no matter what, when I go to capture new material, the program is taking matters into it's own hands and writing the files to my system hard drive rather than the external. Anyone know why this would be happening, it's really pretty annoying since the internal drive doesn't have all that much space. I figured I could just move them afterwards, but that's tedious in itself.

Anyone have an idea?

Matthew Overstreet

What version of FCP are you running? Older versions were a little annoying. If you started up FCP and your external hard drive wasn't available, capture scratch would automatically be switched to the documents folder on your startup drive without any warning.

But ever since FCP 5, if the selected capture drive isn't available you get a dialog box with a warning which says in order to preserve the integrity of your project, you need to put your drive online or designate a new one.

I'm working with Final Cut Pro 4. Well, I figured out the problem. It basically wanted me to select a specific folder within the drive. Before today, whenever I started a project, I'd just select the drive as the scratch disc and it would create a seperate project folder on the drive along with capture scratch, autosave vault and all that. Not sure why it was being picky today, oh well. Thanks for your help though. I'm probably going to purchase the newest version of Final Cut Pro as soon as I buy a new iMac.

Matthew Overstreet

I sort of thought you had an older version of FCP :-) Are you really running FCP 4? At minimum I'd suggest upgrading to FCP 4.5 which you can download at Apple's site for free:

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/finalcutprohd45.html