[This article was first published in the August, 2007, issue of
Larry's Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]

[This technique comes to us courtesy of the June issue of Edit Well, published by
Peachpit Press. I reported on this problem in June, then asked Peachpit for permission to
share it with all of you, to which they graciously agreed.]

I was excited to start using Color, only to be stymied at the very first screen asking me to set the scratch disks for Color.

I clicked the Directory pop-up menu, but this only took me to the top level of my boot drive. I needed to set this to a different drive, but I had never seen a directory screen like this, nor was it described in the Color User Manual.

Clueless, I wrote Alexis Van Hurkman, who wrote the Color User Manual asking for help. He replied:

I'm just so used to this in Shake that it never occurred to me to point this out specifically in the User Manual. Anyhow, do the following:

1) Click the Browse button in either the opening dialog or the Setup room.

2) In the navigation dialog, click the "up directory path" button in the upper-left corner (drive icon with red arrow up) until you're all the way at the top of your drive hierarchy.

3) Scroll down the list of folders until you find Volumes, then double-click it.

You should now see all the hard drive volumes that are currently mounted on your computer presented as individual folders (or items if you’re in list view).

4) From the list of available drive volumes, double-click the one you want to use to open it.

5) Create a new folder to store your media, and double-click it to open it as well.

6) Click Choose.

Repeat this process to create a new folder to store render files.

Steps 4 through 6 are essential because, unlike other Mac OS X apps, the Choose button only sees the current directory path, which ends with the directory that’s currently open. Directories that are selected but not open are not considered to be part of the current path. This isn’t the way the file dialogs work in any of the other Final Cut Pro Studio applications. But the Volumes directory is in fact a standard bit of OS X-ness that’s good to know about, especially for applications like Color and Shake, which treat the file browsing experience in a much more Unix-like fashion.

Larry Jordan is a post-production consultant and an Apple-Certified Trainer in Digital Media with over 25 years experience as producer, director and editor with network, local and corporate credits. Based in Los Angeles, he's a member of both the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America.

The information in this article is believed to be accurate at the time of publication. However, the author assumes no liability in case things go wrong. Please use your best judgment in applying these suggestions.

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