Running Final Cut Pro on a Hackintosh

[Howard Ferguson]

Hi,

Thanks for all the responses.
It’s interesting to learn from the comments.
It was never my intent to create any controversy.

I was talking with a friend.
He’s a smart guy.
You’re a bunch of smart folks.
So it seemed reasonable to ask the question.

I very much appreciate all the help I have received from this forum,
both direction from response to postings, and via searching through previous threads.

Some folks, in particular, have been wonderfully directly helpful with very detailed specific information.
A very very special thanks for that !!!

Howard Ferguson

[Paul Blittzj]

Hey guys, Im posting on one right now but thats all i can seem to do on this thing is surf dl, mail, and post. Quicktime doesn’t even always run, actually it might have once. FCP wont even install, not much will, i couldnt even get starcraft one to run, I installed it but thats as far as I’ve gotten. I’ve been a PC user since i was 7 but the first thing I ever touched was a mac, luckily i learned them both easily. But I could build a PC and that’s what was fun about that when I was around 14. Now I’m 26 and a film student who can’t afford a mac to run FCP 5,6 or 7 on. I’m a wanna be prof. editor/writer who can’t practice anywhere but school which is never open. Luckily Final Draft is not mac only. Anyways I spent decent money on it and I can’t be angry because its still awsome as a PC. Right now I only use my windows 7 hd, this one so far is a waste of a decent hitachi TB. the rest of it is pure awesome for 7-8 big ones compared to 25.

I know final cut pro TENNNNN is comming out which I am madly excited about but I know im gonna have to dish out for that so I’m saving up for whatever newest sickest MACbook pro is out around that time. (because MAC is consistently stepping their game up while PC is economic but os no comment.)

Anyways meanwhile I have this great PC/H that I would like to use as much as possible as a tranfer point and backup for the one that I intend to buy. Since PC and Mac are such stubborn competitors neither of them are going anywhere.

If anyone can direct me to the best places to learn about kext. injector, .boot/ whatever Patrick was saying that would be awesome, because I myself like many other .. filmmakers come from a real world full of difficult experience, a cruel one but beautiful so listen to elvis and help a fellow out, until the tyrannical computer juggernauts somehow come to a compromise, or until mac kills pc.

THank you brilliant ones.

[Patrick Sheffield]

https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/

Patrick

[Ronald Farber]

I don’t mean to resuscitate this post that has gathered a bit of dust, but I came across it from a Google search so I thought I would throw out my 2 cents of experience.

I recently took on the challenge of building myself a pimped out Hackintosh (first time doing it too I might add). It consists of an iCore 7 Intel Processor running at an overclocked 4.0 GHz, contains 12GB of RAM, a Quadro 1700 512MB video card, etc…as I said, pretty pimped out. I jumped a few hurdles in the process but eventually was shown the promise land of the Mac “Welcome” video. I installed all my software, entered the serials and was on my merry way “creating.” Every piece of software runs swimmingly without hiccup or delay, nor crashing or errors. That includes Final Cut 7. The only thing “wrong” with the Hackintosh is that on-board audio doesn’t work, but I have USB speakers so I’m fine with that not working (for now), and the “sleep” function doesn’t work…if I let it go to sleep, it won’t wake back up and I have to force shut down. But since this is a rendering computer for my CG work, I just told it not to sleep…ever. I just shut it down when I don’t need it.

That’s my experience.

I go to school for VFX and Motion Graphics. I enticed a few of my friends into doing the same with the promise I could set it up for them IF (and ONLY if) they bought parts of the exact same specs so that I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel for each setup. Two friends did so, only buying different CD-ROM drives as the website no longer carried the one I bought. For their machines, I simply gave them a cloned HDD of my HDD with all the applications already installed, and magically, Final Cut doesn’t work on neither of their machines. I have no idea what it is, but I really suspect it’s a Final Cut thing more than a Hackintosh thing because 1) every other piece of software works, and 2) what it does it crash on startup. Doesn’t even open, just shows the splash screen before quitting. I have no idea why it would work on my machine and not theirs, considering they are exactly the same parts, at least in every area that matters. I’m still troubleshooting it for them as they’d like it to work but I think if you truly know what you’re doing, or at least turn to forums for help where people know what they’re doing, you can build a Hackintosh that behaves exactly like you’d expect a Mac to. Researching what hardware people have had success with in the past is a good idea, though I must admit I’m guilty of not having done that myself. I was pretty set on “this is what I want, I’m gonna make it work.” And either I just lucked out or I know what I’m doing (I suspect a little of both. 😉

But all in all, I felt the need to post my experience because people who had bad experiences with -any- software on a Hackintosh build, in my opinion, clearly didn’t have it setup properly to begin with.

[Stephen Kidd]

Hi Ronald,

Your Final Cut problem sounds like a licensing problem. Try uninstalling
Final Cut (google FCS Remover) and reinstalling it on the other machines (obviously
with a valid serial number) 🙂

[Michael Sigmon]

It’s now late March 2012. Ronald, is there some way to contact you to ask about your Hackintosh? Unfortunately, no way to send a private message to another user here. C’mon Creative Cow, it’s 2012. Update your forums.