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Advice about upgrading from 4.5 to studio?
I am about to up grade from FCP 4.5 to Final Cut Studio. Yea.. finally a good way to cut a multicam show in the non-liner world. Anyhow, I am more of a computer user than a computer person (know just enough to break things) so I wanted to tap the collective Creative Cow IQ to see if there is anything I should do before upgrading so I don’t loose the 5 projects I am already working on.
Thanks in advance for any advice or guidance.
System
Mac G4 (mirror drive)
Mac OS X 10.3.9
duel 1.25 GHz
1.5 GB ram
80 GB Mac hard drive
160 GB lacie internal hard drive (originally firewire drive)
160 GB Lacie D2 firewire drive
250 GB Lacie D@ Firewire drive -
5 Replies
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:80 GB Mac hard drive
:160 GB lacie internal hard drive (originally firewire drive)If you want to keep FCP 4.5 I would suggest that you use the 160 GB internal drive as a place to load Tiger and FCP Studio.
If you try to load FCS onto the 80 GB drive, it will overwrite FCPHD with FCP 5.
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First and foremost… do NOT upgrade in the middle of any projects!!! That’s a real good way of breaking things. 2nd, make a bootable firewire drive (or if you have a partitioned or 2nd drive in your box). This way if after the upgrade, something goes horribly wrong you can also boot from one of those drives and fix things (and even do some work if you’re in an emergency). 3rd, consider waiting just a bit longer if you can. To make a long story short, our offices had to buy the Studio upgrades immediately in order to get a deal. We were between projects so I upgraded everything (took all weekend to do it right, but it was worth it!) Anyway, things, in general, are fine. I haven’t lost any media (knocking on wood and typing at the same time, wow this is hard) but I have experienced periodic, and seemingly random crashes. Mainly with FCP. Also, 4.5 seemed to just work faster in general. Especially with graphics. Although, FCP does play better with Photoshop (as far as fixing a Photoshop file and it’s re-linking). The best thing I’ve found with FCP so far is it’s re-linking offline media. If you move a project file from one place to another, or change a number of LiveType files, re-linking the offline media is extremely fast.
“If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy Man.” – Peter O’Toole – “The Stuntman”
Work:
Machine Model: Power Mac G5
CPU Type: PowerPC 970 (2.2)
Number Of CPUs: 2
CPU Speed: 2 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 3 GB -
A bootable firewire drive. Sounds cool. What is it?
I can make the guess that its a drive that I can boot from, but can you give me specifics as to how to create one and how to access it if my normal HD has a stroke.
As for the don’t up grade during a project. One of the projects I am wrapping up needs to go in to DVD studio pro. Unfortunately I don’t have except for the one that is part of FCS.
Can I just load DVD-SP and then up grade the rest later? The documentation that came with FCS seems to want me install everything at once.
Thanks so much for your help.
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Good tip. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Thanks
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Sorry, but I’m pretty sure you have to install everything at once. If you must upgrade, then you have to. It’s just one of the rules of thumb I’ve been taught, and I like to pass on.
As far as the bootable drive go to apple.com/support and search there. I can’t find the link or I’d just post it here.
Good luck!
“If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy Man.” – Peter O’Toole – “The Stuntman”
Work:
Machine Model: Power Mac G5
CPU Type: PowerPC 970 (2.2)
Number Of CPUs: 2
CPU Speed: 2 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 3 GB
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