Advice before updating to Lion

[Steve Eisen]

Purchase 3 more hard drives.

Clone your Snow Leopard Start Up. Startup that drive whenever you need FCP 7. The clone will be your back up.

Personally, I would skip Lion and Mountain Lion and go straight to Mavericks. Do fresh installs on 10.9 including Creative Cloud.

Your graphics card is fine for CC. You will have no problems. Once again, use the third hard drive to clone OS 10.9 and use that as a backup.

Use 2 drive bays for your startup drives 10.6 and 10.9.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group

[Shane Ross]

I disagree. Lion isn’t as solid as Mountain Lion…and Mavericks was written without ANY consideration for FCP 7. Many have reported issues with it. But FCP 7 is solid on Mountain Lion, as is Adobe CC, and Avid MC7.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Mark Suszko]

I’m more with Shane on this. My preferred way to go: clone a clean Mountain Lion/ FCS3 install, save offline as a backup. Copy it to a new, empty boot drive, with a separate partition for Mountain Lion and a separate partition for Mavericks. Boot into whichever you need. media as always goes to its own external RAID, I would go with a RAID6.

[Scott Patterson]

Thanks for the advice. I had already bought and downloaded the Lion update. Just realized that if I do the partition route, Lion partition will be a clean slate and I will have to install and copy over tons of stuff, and I don’t even have enough space left on boot drive to fit these duplicates. I don’t want to have it on an external drive.
Looks like I will have to take the slight risk of doing a regular update to Lion, and if FCP 7 doesn’t work, I’ll have to wipe clean and find a way to go back to Snow Leopard.
Guess once I get Adobe CC and learn Premier I can catch up and be on Mavericks.

any other thoughts welcome.

scott

[Steve Eisen]

Hard drives are very inexpensive. Clean installs will yield less problems.

Premiere Pro is an easy transition from FCP.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group

[Roger Poole]

I agree with many of the comments here, I would never compromise a working system by updating the O.S. I have several boot options. Disk one has FCS2 running Snow Leopard, I keep it because I find it much more stable than FCS3 (FCP7). Disk 2 is partitioned into two. Partition 1 has FCS2 running Lion. Partition 2 has FCPX 10.0.9 running under Mountain Lion, I haven’t gone the FCPX 10.1 route because of Mavericks.
When installing multiple boot disks it’s easy to bring over your documents and files of your choice from another disk using Migration assistant.
One important thing to do when running multiple boot drives is to manage indexing because being boot drives they are journaled and so with 3 boot disks and booted into Disk A, it will constantly indexing Disks B & C. To prevent this activity which will slow everything down go to system preferences, Spotlight>Privacy and drag in Disks B and C. Repeat this for all Boot disks, for example if Booted into Disk C put Disks A and D into the Spotlight privacy panel, etc.
This setup works great for me. I still have my old trusted and optimized systems yet have the flexibility to use the newer ones without compromising older Apps. Yeah, some people have managed to get FCP7 running on Mavericks but it’s a bit of a dog so what’s the point.

[Roger Poole]

Correction, partition 1 has FCS3 FCP7.0.3 running under Lion.

[Patrick Givens]

I’ve been using 10.7.5 on two Mac Pros (2010 – 2 x 2.4 quad core w/ATI Radeon HD 5870) running FCP 7 and CS6 for a couple of years now with very few issues. Both machines are work horses and sure FCP crashes once every blue moon (it’s always done that since version 1), and compressor hasn’t worked well for awhile now (adobe media encoder is much better anyway). I would, however, beware of upgrading to Mavericks if you plan on using FCP extensively.

•pgivens•