A full installation of Final Cut Studio 3 with all media content (for Motion, DVD Studio Pro, and Soundtrack Pro Loops) takes up around 40-50 GB of hard drive space.
How about regaining 5-10 GB of precious by enabling HFS compression for these folders? Since HFS compression is completely transparent, there are no adverse effects to expect (other than browsing the content libraries being almost unnoticeably slower).

There is a afsctool tool which allow to compress the folders in HFS+ file system. AFSC (Apple File System Compression) tool is an utility that can be used to apply HFS+ compression to file (s), decompress HFS+ compressed file (s), or get information about existing HFS+ compressed file (s). Mac OS 10.6 or later is required. Don't know about UDIF, but HFS+ does support transparent compression. There is an opensource tool called afsctool that will be able to convert your files into compressed state. Not sure whether the tool will work on Linux, as I think it uses build-in Mac OS X api.

Afsctool Hfs Compression For Mac Osx

To start, you’ll need a command-line tool called afsctool which can compress (and, amongst other features, decompress) folders using HFS compression. The command you’ll need to run is e.g. sudo afsctool -c -l -k -v -i -9 /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Studio. This compresses all files the given folder using the highest possible compression, verifies its results, prints out the names of files it is unable to compress, and outputs statistics once it’s done.

Afsctool Hfs Compression For Mac Pro

Some of the folders I compressed:
/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Studio/ (contains Motion and DVD Studio Pro templates): 22.5% compression savings
/Library/Application Support/LiveType/ (contains Motion’s LiveType fonts): 11.4% compression savings
/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/ (contains GarageBand’s instruments and learning-to-play stuff): 14.3% compression savings
/Library/Application Support/iDVD/ (contains iDVD’s themes): 19.5% compression savings
/Library/Audio/Apple Loops/ (contains GarageBand’s and Soundtrack Pro’s loops): 4.1%
/Library/Audio/Impulse Responses/ (contains Soundtrack Pro’s impulse response data): 41.3% compression savings

Looking at the compression savings: everything that contains high-quality video can be compressed by around 20%, while audio which is already heavily compressed only yields around 5%. The most amazing result though are the 40% by which the Impulse Responsed were compressed – apparently, these are uncompressed AIFF audio files and thus ideal for compression.

Afsctool Hfs Compression For Mac Os

Obviously, your mileage may vary and I’m not responsible if you compress too much and break your system (I’m sure there is a reason why Apple didn’t compress all system files). However, compressing the iLife and Final Cut Studio media content appears safe, I haven’t noticed any unwanted side-effects and it seems well worth trying if you’d like to regain a few gigabytes.