FCP 6-7 meets El Capitan

[Christopher Mcdonell]

Today, I’m my own guinea pig. I upgraded from 10.8.5 to 10.11.1 and have been cutting just fine with FCP 6.0.6 all day. So far so good. No issues to report. I’ll keep the readers of this post posted.

[Grant Wilber]

For others wondering. I just bought a macbook pro, upgraded to El Capitan, installed FCP7, and it’s been running ok. Certain projects have crashed a lot, I think it’s just when it’s pushing a heavy timeline with layers of video or lots of effects. But it’s still functioning for those that need it.

[Peter Humble]

I noticed a few people in this thread suggesting to boot from a partitioned drive and that this is really straight forward.

Call me a dinosaur but I’m keen to keep running FCP7. I do a lot of editing but am not working as a “pro” and I can’t afford a new computer as some here suggest as a solution.

I’m running Mountain Lion on a 2011 Macbook and and runs beautifully.

My reason for wanting to upgrade the OS is for pretty much everything else I do on my computer outside of FCP7. My feeling is that as my non pro software gets continually updated (I usually just grab updates as they come up for general user apps) that my computer is struggling a bit. I’m assuming this is because a lot of the newer general purpose software is optimised for the more recent OS.

So my question is can someone point me to how I configure my system to achieve what many here suggest of running concurrent OS’s on the same machine?

Thanks

[Michael Brown]

Hi Roger, I can in fact: I am tackling a big doc project that will take me months to edit, and I doubt my current (and beloved) MacBook Pro with it’s limited RAM and processor can handle it; besides, I want to (exceptionally) make use of multi-clip editing in this project (primarily to gain time on various aspects of it), and the MB Pro just won’t handle playback in multiclip, and I also need to use 3 monitors, which the MBP won’t deliver to. So I have no choice but to buy a decent new machine, and there I am: stuck with El Cap for an iMac (affordable and decent solution for my needs), or Maverick on a MacPro (NOT affordable!). Switching to FCPX is out of the question because I don’t have the time to adapt to it on this project. In a nutshell.

So I’d be glad for a simple answer from users who have taken the dive.

Thanks to all for so many interesting posts. It’s good to feel you’re not alone 😉

Michael Brown

[Michael Brown]

I folks, so to sum up what I remaorked on Roger’s and Ernie’s comments earlier in the thread:

I NEED a new computer to handle the large project I’m tackling, because my otherwise very dependable MBP 15″ ist just plain to slow to accommodate so much footage, an additional external monitor, and drive multiclip editing …
I CANNOT move to FCPX because I don’t have the time to adapt to it on this project
and DON’T really have the moolah for a $7.000 MacPro set up (that would open on Yosemite, if need be).

Hence the question: FCP 7 on a 27″ iMac 5K, yes or no?

Thanks folks 😀

Michael Brown

[Christopher Mcdonell]

HI Michael,

Since you’re posting on this thread, I assume your real question is whether FCP 7 will work with El Capitan, the defacto OS of any new hardware upgrade. On matters of compatibility, it seems vs 6 and 7 are pretty much the same, save for 6’s need for Rosetta if one wishes to do a clean install. So as mentioned a few threads up, I became my own guinea pig recently and upgraded my 2012 rMBP to El Capitan and have been happily cutting away with FCP 6 for 3 weeks now with no issues whatsoever. Really boggles my mind how “it can work for some and not others”. My experience so far has been fabulous. And I’m really loving El Cap, even better than Mavericks.

I’ve so far cut and mastered a 5 minute video using HDV 30p. I did some titling in Motion 5. Since you can’t roundtrip with this version, I’ve been exporting the clips as ProRes 4444 and bringing them in. I’ve applied a few filters: 3-way Colour Corrector, Broadcast Safe, etc. The usual transitions: fades, dissolves. No crashing, no hiccups at all.

I sent audio to Soundtrack Pro for Multitrack Editing. STP has worsened for age, that I can say. It crashed on me anytime I clicked out to check email or browse Safari. But I’ve always had a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with STP. At least I was able to export an AIF sound mix, bring it back into FCP and voila!

Finally, I exported a QT movie (both as reference & self-contained). Then finished up in Compressor.

A user above warns of crashing with big files. Well, I’m now back onto my 100 minute doc. It’s multi-layered, with lots of graphics, stills and audio tracks. So far, no problems…

All in all, I’m glad I upgraded. It’s given me a chance to test out the free FCPX trial. (Cause let’s face it, eventually we’re going to have to abandon this gentle giant!) And of course, I made a clone of my Mavericks drive so I’ve always got that to fall back on. But I’m optimistic things will be just fine.

My specs: FCP 6.0.6, El Capitan, rMBP 15″ i7 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM

[Michael Brown]

Thanks Christopher!

That’s more or less exactly what I wanted to hear, and if I read more such statements, I would feel safer in the choice I am making: I’ve decided to go for the more affordable iMac solution, and am getting the previous 5K model that was just replaced a couple of months ago by the new one with its advantages of still running on Yosemite and the option to upgrade to El Cap, should FCP7 turn out to run better on the latter. The difference between this system and what I’m using now is more than overwhelming enough, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be satisfied. My current project is a music doc (the making of a contemporary jazz album), for which I shot hours of live, studio and interviews, usually combining up to 7 different cameras, so I have a shit load of work ahead of me.

To whom it may concern, knowing that I may be taking a risky dive, I’m hanging on to my current MBP on the reliable Snow Leopard, so if all hell breaks loose, I can always go back to that for this project, but I hope I don’t have to and I’ll keep you folks posted on his thread.

Anyone out there who can tell me that if I migrate my FCP7 to the iMac, will I still have the license on the former MBP set-up?

Best from Hamburg (f**g rainy these days) 😉

Michael Brown

[Bobby Hall]

I just bought a rMBP and I’d like to install FCP 7 on it. It came with Yosemite and I was wondering if it makes any difference if I upgrade to El Capitan. Is there any difference in how FCP 7 runs in El Capitan compared to Yosemite?

[Michael Brown]

Bobby, 1st off FCP 7 runs quite well up to now on my new iMac with Yosemite. From my personal experience a MBP will be a bit slow for FCP7, unless you’re not interested in multicam editing. Can you go over 8 Gb RAM on that, and what’s the processor and graphics card? That will make your difference. (Note that I ran fcp 7 on my 5-yrs old MBP for 5 years very successfully, but it spent nights converting and rendering which took up too much memory to do anything else simultaneously.

I recently switched to the affordable iMac precisely for that reason, hence boosting the latter, and of course it’s much more comfortable, but I specifically chose the previous (3-month old) model in order to get it with Yosemite and if needed, be bale to upgrade to El Capitan in case FCP didn’t operate well. The other way around doesn’t work – you can’t downgrade! – and then I wouldn’t have had that option.

However, and this in reply to my previous posts and questions, many of which were nicely answered:

It appears that the drive speed is an essential factor. Up to a few days ago I was using 4TB LaCie drives, one for the ProRes converted media, the other for render files and original media storage, and despite the much faster iMac, playback in multicam was bogging. My drives were connected via USB 3, previously on the MBP via FW800.

So I splurged 350 bucks on a LaCie 4TB Thunderbolt drive, sacrificed one port and hence one additional external monitor (that I could always try to connect with USB), hoping thunderbolt would make the difference.

IT DOES NOT! In fact, FCP multicam works better on the previous drive! The thunderbolt drive takes longer to restart playback once it’s bogged (sound keeps rolling and it eventually catches up) than hitting the pause button twice to get playback rolling again in sync. I am tempted to send the damn thing back. I cannot afford 350 bucks for lousy experiments anymore.

What does work in multicam is setting your RT playback to medium quality and half-frames when multicam playback is checked and unclicking auto render! The playback is of course stuttery, but for the 1st editing process it works, even on the 9-angle set-up. Once you uncollapse your multicam clip for decent preview, effects etc… then you can uncheck multicam playback and you see what you deserve. So that’s ‘satisfactory’.

Q1: Do I understand correctly that the thunderbolt drive being a typical 7200 rpm drive is not substantially sped up by the thunderbolt connection and that my investment was to little to no avail?

Q2: Does all this mean that for better playback conditions in multicam (9 angles) I have to move on to an SSD drive? The financial aspect is frightening.

Who can keep my going on this before I give up?

Thanks for your invaluable support!

Michael Brown

[Declan Smith]

A1 – Thunderbolt is fast, but your speed will be governed by the disk. Use the Black Magic Disk Speed test program to see whether your read/write speeds are sufficient. See below, if you have an external multi disk capable setup that you cold put into a RAID0 array, that may help.

A2 – I have changed the main disks in my Mac to SSD’s but for the main media drives, this would be prohibitively expensive. What I do have for my media drives is put two of them in a RAID 0 configuration which approximately makes them twice as fast. So two plain old drives in a RAID 0 configuration will give you higher read and write speeds. Of coarse you don’t have any redundancy and if one drive fails, you lose all data stored in the RAID 0 array, but you really should have a backup regime in place consisting of three copies of your data. It’s gutting to think I have three 12TB arrays, which you would think is 36TB of storage, but as 2 of them are backups, it’s just 12TB, but spinning disks are cheap and there would be nothing worse than losing the data!

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”