How do I "completely" clear my hard drive?

[whiff79]

I have been doing some capture tests with my Mac and FCP 5. I have about 20 or 30 gigs of video that I sent to the trash bin, and then emptied the trash, thinking this would clear up the space on my HD. Not the case, my space keeps going down, even after I've deleted these items. I'm new to Macs, so I'm sure there's something I'm not doing. Any help???

[Frobozz]

How about the FCP 5 Project files? Have you deleted those?

[whiff79]

okay, how do I access the FCP program files??

[Frobozz]

Not the program files, the project files. When you start a FCP project you save a file to the hard drive. That's where everything gets kept for that specific project.

Another thing you could do is choose Find from the Finder's File menu. Click on the top button in the window that appears (it probably says "Name") and change it to "Size". Then enter a number such as 10,000. All the files "Greater Than" that size will show up in the window. Maybe this will help you see where some big unnecessary files are on your hard drive.

[MerlinMacuser]

How about the FCP 5 Project files? Have you deleted those?

Look in the Documents directory.

[ffooky]

Disk Inventory X is a nice way to spot big superfluous files.

[hexxisoft]

wow, i thought it was easier.

[DanSlagle]

Open the "Render Manager" in FCP

[galactica]

do you store your projects on a seperate drive? If so you could just re-initalize that drive every once and a while.

Thats what I do, i have a 300 gig project drive that gets "zeroed" every so often