FCP under Leopard, is it good to go? – I tested it under fire – here’s my opinion

[David Roth weiss]

Well, if its just DVCPro one SATA will suffice until you get into a substancial edit with lots of layers and elements.

So meanwhile, check the updates and see if that’s it. If not, I may have other ideas for you.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Sean Oneil]

Another editor here has been using it for over a month. His Tiger system disk failed. Rather than install everything twice, we just went ahead and did Leopard.

It’s definitely not faster. But it’s worked out pretty well. It’s a hell of a lot more stable than FCP 6.01 on Tiger was.

But, I’ve been told by someone much smarter than me that under the hood, Leopard is a bit of a disaster and that nobody should start using it until 10.5.2 is out.

[Jon Fordham]

Thanks for all this. I’ll check out your suggestions on Monday morning. One further question; if the drive can playback the media in simple playback mode, does the “drives not fast enough” error during output make sense?

[Michael Sacci]

One area I have notice a huge increase in speed is with Compressor. It is twice at least twice as fast on my 8-core that with Tiger.

[David Roth weiss]

[Jon Fordham] “if the drive can playback the media in simple playback mode, does the “drives not fast enough” error during output make sense?”

Jon,

Consider that error message as generic for, “your system dropped frames and we aren’t sure why.” Most often in days past it would have meant hard drive throughput was unable to keep up with the data rate necessary for capture or playback of data intensive codecs, but today the systems are faster and SATA drives are faster, so dropped frames are often a sign of other issues.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Ben Holmes]

David

Nice to hear someone else say this – as I said in a previous post I have used FCS2 with Leopard on my personal MBP since the launch with no problems.

Let me go further than that: I have used FCP with Leopard since launch with NO CRASHES. Not one. This is on HDV, DV and Uncompressed SD projects. I don’t use it intensively, but still… Perhaps the fact that I haven’t used any third party devices such as capture cards (as it’s a MBP) is relevent here. I don’t think I even did a clean install on my laptop (as I said it’s a personal machine), so I think FCS2 was already installed when I upgraded to Leopard. Not that I would recommend doing that on our work systems in a thousand years…

Also, over the same period, our Mac Pros that have FCS2 installed on Tiger have been stable, but have had the odd crash. With Motion 3, they’re a disaster – I usually save after any changes worth keeping. Motion 3 runs better on my MBP with less RAM and a worse gfx card under Leopard.

Now this ain’t very scientific an’ all – but perhaps it’s not very suprising: in all likelihood FCS2 was written with Leopard in mind, so it ought to run well on it. Does it run faster? Not that I can see on a direct comparison on the MBP. However, as others have commented, Leopard looks a little sharper graphically, clearer on the screen, and I find this a little easier on the eyes on a laptop screen.

I am happy to recommend Leopard to anyone now who uses FCS2 – handy since a new Mac Pro will have little choice but to run Leopard….

Ben

[David Roth weiss]

[Ben Holmes] “I am happy to recommend Leopard to anyone now who uses FCS2 – handy since a new Mac Pro will have little choice but to run Leopard….”

I’m with you on this Ben. I just wanted to let others know that there is no reason to fear Leopard, and perhaps maybe even a few good reasons to switch. The fact that Leopard held up for me in a very intensive and time critical situation was good enough for me.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Paul Belanger]

Walter
I’ve been running AE 7 under Leopard for a month and a half now
on my Mac Mini.
I haven’t noticed any problems.
What is supposed to be the problem?

Paul

ATOMIC POST
https://www.atomicpost.us

[Shawn Bockoven]

Not for the defective box, but great customer service. Our first IoHD was Bad out of the box. AJA shipped us a replacement on faith we would return the defective Io. New IoHD is working great!!

Shawn Bockoven
METV

[Walter Biscardi]

[Paul Belanger] “I’ve been running AE 7 under Leopard for a month and a half now
on my Mac Mini.
I haven’t noticed any problems.
What is supposed to be the problem?”

It’s After Effects 8 (CS3) that has not been updated. Adobe noted that Premiere and After Effects were supposed to have received updates in December to make them Leopard compatible.

Some folks in the After Effects forum say it is working, though with a few quirks. I’m going to wait for Adobe to release the updates. I would not trust my company and deadlines to Leopard until Adobe says it’s ready and we can test everything for a few days first.

I am actually installing a new hard drive into my Mac Pro this week just to start installing Leopard and everything on there so when the updates come out, we can start testing immediately.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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