Upgrade 4.5 to 5

[Shane Ross]

The upgrade should be pretty painless, but a good way to keep FCP 4.5 and Panther around (A DARN stable system if you ask me) is to install Panther and FCP 4.5 on a separate drive and boot from that drive when you need to. Or, if you don’t have another secondary internal yet, get one and install Tiger and FCP 5 on that and keep you old system on the original drive.

That is what I do.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I’ve had no problems at all opening 4.5 projects into 5.0

Just remember that you can’t go BACK once you’ve done that. It might be a good idea to make a duplicate copy of anything you’re going to open in 5 so that you have an un-changed legacy file.

But that’s just for safety. I’ve had no problems with old projects on FCP 5.

[Dan Riley]

I HAVE had problems opening 4.5 project in 5.
Some do, and convert just fine. Others won’t
open at all. They crash midway through the process.

I kept my 4.5/OS 10.3.7. system on a separate drive
partition because I was expecting trouble. I did a clean
install of Tiger and then Final Cut Studio. Now if I
need to go back to the old 4.5 project, I just boot
into that other partition, open FCP 4.5 and the old
project file and everything is fine. I’ve updated my
Aurora Pipe Studio drivers on the old partition too.
They are backwords compatible so I was told
that was the way to go. It’s been good.

FCP5, well that’s another story.
I would not have upgraded except I needed the
multicam for a project because our AVID was
tied up. FCP 5 is not ready for prime time if
you are doing a lower rez offline, like DV, then
uprezing to 10 bit uncompressed for finishing.
The media management is terrible.
Many extra hours will be spent by you fixing stuff.
I’m pretty frustrated with FCP 5 (and 5.0.2)
because of this and a general instability
compared to 4.5, which was very solid.
But the multicam did work very well for my 4 camera shoot.
I’m used to AVID so that says something
for Apple’s 1.0 version of that feature.

Dan

[David Johnson]

Thanks much to each of you for the useful info/warnings. I’ve heard of similar issues with 5 and am also trying to decide whether I should stick with FCP for the second system/suite we’re about to build or go with one of the comparable Avid systems (coming from PC world, I have little experience with either, although plenty with other NLEs). Any insight/comparisons from those who’ve used both extensively?