Hello you beautiful editor. Sooner or later you'll need to hand a Final Cut library over to someone else, a collaborator, a client's editor, or just yourself on another Mac. Here's how to do it the easy way.
Step 1: Delete the generated files
Open your library browser (Control Command 1), select the library you want to send, go to File → Delete Generated Library Files, and clear out your render files, optimized media, and proxy media. Sending a library full of rendered and transcoded files makes it enormous and painful to upload and download. Don't worry, this isn't destructive, you or the other editor can just re-render or re-transcode later if needed. You'll see a massive drop in size.
Step 2: Consolidate the media into the library
Next, go to File → Consolidate Library Media and switch the media destination to In Library, then hit OK. This copies all the original media right into the library, so you don't have to separately send over the footage and photos, and the other editor won't open it to a bunch of red missing-file frames.
Step 3: Compress it and share the link
Finally, right-click the library and hit Compress. (For some reason I can only compress mine when it's sitting on my computer's hard drive, if you know why, drop it in a comment.) Once it's done, upload that compressed file to Google Drive, Dropbox, or whatever you use, and send the link. The other editor downloads it and gets straight to work.
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