FCP advice for beginners

[galad]

Disable background render, 99.9% of the times rendering is unneeded and will only fill the disk for no advantages.

 

[JustinePaula]

That is great advice, fills up rapidly..

 

[StoneJack]

Later you can reduce library size by deleting user-created files.

 

[dandeco]

Disable background render, 99.9% of the times rendering is unneeded and will only fill the disk for no advantages.

When I used my 2012 quad-core i7 Mac Mini, I indeed disabled the background rendering to save resources and disk space. But on my M1 MacBook Air I've enabled it, as I do delete the render files after each large video project I make, and I also found the background rendering useful in pre-2007 versions of iMovie (it seems Final Cut Pro X has quite a bit in common with those older versions of iMovie, like chapter mark creation and featuring many of the same video effects, but with the added convenience of keyframe control), along with in my Windows days when I used Pinnacle Studio and Pinnacle/AVID Liquid Edition. (My college's audiovisual director, who worked with Pinnacle Systems at one time, joked that Apple must've bought a license from Pinnacle or AVID to implement the background rendering into the new Final Cut Pro.)

Still a lot better than the pre-X versions of Final Cut Pro/Express often requiring you render the timeline footage just to play back a clip that was modified in some way!