A common mistake that many beginners make when starting the video editing process, is setting their capture catch to the wrong drive. I have encountered many newbies who have a massive hard drive and feel that they should put everything on their system drive. This is a mistake.

If you set your capture drive to be the same as your system drive, you take a tremendous risk with you media and project data. System drives have a tendency to crash or fail and if all your media resides on that same drive, you loose hours, days or months worth of work. NOT a good strategy.

This is why Apple suggest you set you Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro capture scratch to a seperate drive. This can be achieved by setting a partition on your “massive drive” and putting the system files on one partition and let the other be used exclusively for media projects. A better solution is to have a second drive installed in your tower or an external drive connected via firewire.

To change your capture scratch in Final Cut Express and/or Final Cut Pro. Open the application and click Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro, depending on the application you are using. Then click System Settings. A window with the Scratch Disk tab selected will appear.

System Settings - Final Cut Pro

Click the Set button at the top of the screen and select the drive you want to serve as your capture scratch. Make sure the Video Capture, Video Render, and Audio Render boxes are checked. Once you have have made the change, click OK and Final Cut will reset your capture scratch to the new drive.