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Install on unsupported Macs & Mac App Store thoughts
To take a break from all the back and forth about FCP X, I thought I would share my brief install experience.
We have 4 Macs that regularly used FCP. 2 with FCP X supported graphic cards, 2 that were lacking. 3 of these Macs also used my personal Apple ID in their Mac App Store. So here is what I did.
Created a new Apple ID for the company, with a company credit card. On a supported Mac (my client computer, a MacMini actually) logged out of my personal account, and logged into the new company account on the Mac App Store. Purchased FCP X and downloaded. Then in the Mac App Store, logged back into my personal account.
Once installed, I just copied the app to a FW drive, and then copied that right into the Application folder on the 3 other Macs (including 2 unsupported ones). It prompted me to login using my company Apple ID on a 2 machines (strangely not all of them). And now FCP X is actually working on even the unsupported GPUs. Here is my list of Macs that it is running on:
Mac Pro 2006, Radeon 5660 1 gig VRAM (supported)
iMac 2008, Nvidia something (supported)
MacBook Pro 2007, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 128MB (unsupported)
Mac Pro 2006, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT (unsupported)Note: This is not an endorsement of FCP X. Seriously, if you haven’t purchased it and are thinking “oh it will be cool, it can’t be that bad”. Just hold that thought, and hold onto your credit card for about a month. Get back to work and do some projects. Go hug your spouse and your kids. Look at the trees. Consider the heavens. You’ll be in a much better place that those of us in the thick of this… thing.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
8 Replies
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Note: This is not an endorsement of FCP X. Seriously, if you haven’t purchased it and are thinking “oh it will be cool, it can’t be that bad”. Just hold that thought, and hold onto your credit card for about a month. Get back to work and do some projects. Go hug your spouse and your kids. Look at the trees. Consider the heavens. You’ll be in a much better place that those of us in the thick of this… thing.
LOL. That’s probably the best advice I’ve heard! love it!
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george manzanilla
rundfunk media
http://www.rundfunk.com
vimeo.com/rundfunk -
[Timothy Payton] “Seriously, if you haven’t purchased it and are thinking “oh it will be cool, it can’t be that bad”. Just hold that thought, and hold onto your credit card for about a month. Get back to work and do some projects.”
Thanks… I needed that. I’ve been spending way too much time on these forums reading about a product that I know won’t have the functionality I need for at least the next 6 months. Time to get back to work.
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Personally I appreciate that we now have time to learn with it before the feature set grows into Pro. It’ll allow you to play along with the Ripple Training or Larry Jordan tutorials. When you finally get the features you need you’ll only need to learn that additionally. You’ll be the veteran amongst newbies.
Maybe kinda like being a leader in Lord of the Flies. 😉
Seriously, having the lead time to learn while it’s still growing is a good thing IMHO.
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I’m preaching to myself.
I was up till midnight playing with the crazy thing. Then got up and before I even got in the shower and I was checking the Cow forums on my iPhone! I’m out of control!
I did my due diligence. I tried to give a gracious and constructive feedback to Apple via their form. I clicked one star “I hate it” on the Mac App Store. My voice has been heard.
I’m taking tomorrow off, going to see Cars 2 with my boys. There is more to this life than the state of a video editing app. I didn’t marry Apple. I married my wife. I wouldn’t take a bullet for FCP but would for my sons.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I’d take a bullet for my wife too.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
[Craig Seeman] “play along with the Ripple Training or Larry Jordan tutorials”
Look, guys, seriously! Don’t give your hard-earned money to these third parties, charming and well-intentioned as they may be. Read the Manual, as they say (not always politely) – this really is an absurdly easy app to learn, about as “shallow” as it gets right now. If you really can’t get your head round it, go see Larry and Steve and have your hand held through stuff you probably already know anyway, but save your pennies for later if you possibly can.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi, first post here btw.
I was lucky to be able to download FCPX (well some might disagree) with my iMac 7,1 which has one of the unsupported Radeon HD 2600s. It works fine, it’s a little sluggish at render and very sluggish at image stabilisation but to be honest my MacBook that does have a supported NVidia card in it is almost as slow.
I did a good deal of digging around on OpenCL today and it seems that OpenCL on Snow Leopard has 4 Kernels
An AMD, one which is restricted to running on the ‘compute shader’ of the AMD chipsets that support it and doesn’t support the ‘vector shader’ of the chipsets (which all the cards have, only 4xxx+ series have a compute shader).
A PTX kernel which is used for NVidia cards
A 32 bit x86 Kernel (why???)
An x86 Kernel
It looks like for some tasks (and I didn’t pull the OpenCL samples apart too much) that a GPU based Kernel is absolutely required, if the Kernel is then going on to manipulate the graphics directly.
In the case of FCPX though I’m guessing this doesn’t happen and the x64 Kernel may be the one that’s ‘unofficially’ supporting the product on unsupported machines.
The downside is that Apple could, in one line of code, specifically request the GPU type of OpenCL Kernel only. It would be extremely petty to do that though since performance levels are bearable for some folks on a tight budget and it would stop the product running on a Machine that the App Store already OK’d for the product to be installed on.
This site has some background on the ATI cards https://netkas.org/?p=182
Sadly the option strings in the part of the framework that are mentioned have been now removed so it looks like somebody decided to tighten up the ATI OpenCL codebase.
Regards,
Andy
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Sorry for the typo, the last one should have read…
x64 Kernel
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