FCP 6-7 meets El Capitan

[Declan Smith]

As there are many differing opinions on whether you should upgrade or not and no clear “yes it works, no it doesn’t” answer, I would suggest that you try it out for yourself on your setup, but by first ensuring you have a cast iron way back to your existing setup if it doesn’t work. There are many ways to do this but my suggestion would be:

1. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an entire bootable copy of your existing system drive to an external drive.
2. Boot to the external drive to ensure it is working.
3. Shutdown you machine, and unplug the external drive.
4. Boot up your machine as normal and upgrade it to El Capitan.
5. Try out all your software including FCP7, if it all appears to work, great, mission accomplished, but if it doesn’t, just plugin in your backup drive, reboot to it, and carbon copy clone it back to your original system drive.

A variation on this would be to create a blank bootable drive and install a new copy of El Capitan (as opposed to upgrade), then install each of your software packages so you know whether you can get an El Capitan FCP7 system built from 1st principles. In every case, always ensure you have a full bootable backup of your existing system.

I personally have more than one bootable partition for this very reason so I can test myself what works and what doesn’t, and I have an instant way back to a known working state. In my case I still have one or two things that need Rosetta, and therefore have a Snow Leopard Partition, but I find I boot into that less and less these days as 98% of my apps work in a higher OS version.

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

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Jason Scholder]

Declan Smith. Wow. Thank you so much for this thorough response! I will try exactly what you said.

I found some videos that left me feeling hopeful. Here are the links. I’m assuming it’s okay to share YouTube video links here, correct? There’s no money it in.

Final Cut Pro 7 running v.happily on El Capitan Beta 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8OG6LKb00k

Final Cut Pro 7 / Final Cut Studio 3 install on El Capitan Final Release
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09PnYWAMcgc

Take it easy!

Jason

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[Martin Johnson]

I’ve just upgraded from an early 2011 Macbook Pro to a new iMac, running El Capitan. (10.11.2)
FCP 7.0.3 has been my workhorse for almost 8 years and whilst I have the Adobe Creative Suite as well – I still prefer FCP. I upgraded my MBP to El Capitan before I bought the iMac.
I used my Time machine backup from my MBP to install all my programs onto the new iMac and part from one niggle – it all works fine.
Only problem is the colour picker doesn’t seem to work. (Using it to set the white colour balance produces a weird colour). But I can just grade by eye anyway. Seems to work OK.
I take the points about using an old, outdated bit of software on a new system – but like some of those in teh forum, it’s what works for me. Hope this helps.

[John Rofrano]

[Martin Johnson] “Only problem is the colour picker doesn’t seem to work.”

That’s interesting. I’m having a similar problem with DVD Studio Pro 4 in Yosemite. When I go to select the color for highlighting buttons all of the options are blank. That’s the only thing that doesn’t work for me and it makes it difficult to change the button highlights. This is why I keep a Snow Leopard partition in my 2010 Mac Pro so that I can boot into Snow Leopard and use DVD Studio Pro without any issues if needed. There must be something that changed about color in newer versions of OS X that has broken this seemingly simple feature of selecting colors. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Roger Poole]

The color pickers have been broken since Mavericks :o/

[Bobby Hall]

I noticed a problem with the font controls in FCP 7 in Yosemite. I installed the font “Bank Gothic Medium” in my font book and it shows up in my FCP 7 fonts, but when I type in the Controls tab, I don’t see the text. It shows up in the video tab, but I can’t see what I’m typing! Anyone know how to fix this?

[Erik Meyn]

FCP 7 works, but not properly. I am an 61 year old employee in the NRK in Oslo (we are “the BBC of Norway”). I can edit, but sometimes, when I attempt to export and/or save a project, the pop-up window for naming a file exists after a few seconds. I am not able to name (or rename) the file properly, but so far I have been able to save a file without naming it properly or choosing a path manually. I upgraded to El Capitan without a clean install. My iMac is five years old and of course I should have kept the machine as it was. Why I am using FCP7? It suits me. But, of course, now I´ll get a new machine. The NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) have opted for Adobe Premiere and I know that my new life in 64 bit will allow me to use more than 4 GB RAM. Fine. But it´s still a tool. If I am drilling a hole in the wall, who wants to know if I am using Bosch or DeWalt? To people who are happy with FCP 7: Stay away from El Capitan and enjoy your work with what you´ve got. Cheers!

Erik Meyn
Journalist and TV director
Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. – NRK
NRK MUHA, N-0340 Oslo, Norway

[Scott Koué]

There are different answers for different people/ situations. To assume that your personal needs and wishes are the same as everyone else’s is just not very helpful to anyone.

The short answer is maybe. I’m in a similar quandary. My main gig is sound post and that is done on another machine. The sound hardware ran over $15K and would cost almost as much to upgrade with no big upside so that machine is sound only on a G5 running very old (by todays standards) software. Works great and I have a backup G5 so that system will probably not change unless some really big $ job comes in that requires it.

My quandary is on the second system. It was a MBP that couldn’t go past 6.8, but I upgraded the whole thing to a newer machine and basically was forced to go to 10.10.

FCP6 works on 10.10 and all of the plugins I had also work fine. Many other parts of FCS2 however didn’t make the switch successfully. IF upgrading to FCX would have worked I would have dropped the $ and doe it BUT FCPX does not export OMF’s and has a number of other issues plus (at least then) would not import FCP6 projects. So that was a dead end. The big switch to app for many had been Premiere and I might have gone there if it hadn’t become CC and gone subscription.

So figuring that FCP6 would be dead in OSX10.11 and refusing to rent software I went on a quest for alternatives.
And that is what I would recommend for you. FCP6 might work for you in 10.11 but it’s a roll of the dice and you might have some odd problems and will have zero support so…

My solutions (I’m still on 10.10 BTW):
FCP:
I have been migrating everything to DaVinci Resolve. It fits my needs but you should definitely check it out to see if it meets yours. My reasons are 1) FCPX doesn’t meet my needs with out a bunch of third party helpers and I have zero trust that Apple will not pull the rug out again. CC is subscription and I won’t go there. DaVinci is a mixed bag. As a NLE it works but is still growing so in many ways it’s not as mature as CC or FCPX, but it has fantastic color correction built in. It is a solid and professional workflow and I have a lot of confidence that it will be supported and not dropped for a more “grandma friendly” downgrade in the future. And it imports just about everything so my old projects with some tweaking have all worked. My most important plugins have versions that work in Resolve.

Photoshop:
Affinity Photo has been a pretty good replacement. I actually have a bunch of pain/ draw applications and between them haven’t had the need to open PS(CS4) in a long time. CS4 works, mostly, in 10.10 but I have heard that it won’t at all in 10.11. Affinity Designer is the vector partner and the projects are cross compatible. Together they really cover a lot of ground.

Motion/ After Effects:

Fusion (also by Black Magic) is extremely powerful. The downside is that it is node based and the learning curve from track based such as AE and Motion is steep at first. The upside is that ALL of the top VFX applications are node based because of how incredibly flexible the system is so once you get your head around it you will be amazed at how much more “logical” things are.

I am still holding off on the OS upgrade till I make sure all my old projects have opened in the newer apps. So far it has been pretty solid. The exceptions of course are projects with plugins that don’t cross over, but that is always the case. So right now if There is an issue I can still open the original and see what I did so I can use the DaVinci equivalent. Really there are not that many projects that I need to be able to reopen and update so I expect in a month or so I will be doing the 10.11 update.

I’m updating because there are other updates and such that need 10.11.