[Craig Thomas quinlan]

All you need to do is move your old startup disk over to the adjacent sata slot in your mac pro, boot from the new Snow Leopard startup disk, and drag and drop your docs, pictures, etc., between the two volumes. Many of our clients keep their old startup disk on the shelf when they’re done, or make a disk image of it, so that should something come up they can easily revert to the old OS.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Read this forum post by David Roth Weiss:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1050273

This probably isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but since you’re asking how to do a “clean install” of Leopard, the answer is you don’t use Time Machine. For a clean install, you need to reinstall your applications from scratch.

The way most people out there are doing this is to make a clone of the original Leopard drive using CCC or SuperDuper, both of which are free, erasing the drive or buying a new sata drive, and reinstalling from scratch. This is the only way to truly have a clean install. Anything else, you’re risking a whole host of issues.

There are a lot of posts right here in the forums about how to do a clean install of leopard, and you’ll tend to see the posters that try to do it any other way being frowned upon, and this is really just for your own good.

If you need to reimport documents and photos and such, this won’t be an issue, but everything else needs to be fresh.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

This isn’t a preferences issue. If you’re able to open autosave vault versions of the project without issue, but can’t open the latest iteration, this points to a corrupt project file.

When you say you can’t open it, what’s the actual error you get?

If you can still open the project file on the mac pro, try dragging everything into a brand new project, save this as a new project file, and bring that over to the macbook pro. If your versions of FCP match, there shouldn’t be an issue.

And if you ever do have differing versions of FCP, you can save your fcp project file as an xml to open it on a different machine. Your mileage may vary with the translation and accuracy, but this is the workaround.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

>I got the project on a hard drive.

I know. What I’m asking is whether the files from your HD originated on tape, like hdcam-sr or digibeta, or are they tapeless media, like xdcam or p2. This makes a huge difference because you can recapture tape by TC if needed. If the original tapes still exist somewhere, this is a form of backup.

>I have copied the original files to another hard drive as backup. I don’t know what you mean by nonrecoverable. I tried running the session from that drive and found pointing the project file to the new location was a problem. There are about 600GB of files.

By nonrecoverable, I mean both your FCP project files, as well as anything without timecode. This means photoshop docs, images, music, sound effects, etc. If it doesn’t have timecode, it needs backing up. Also, don’t just point your project file to a new drive, this isn’t the right backup strategy – you want multiple versions of the exact same project file in its exact same state – a carbon copy – so that if one dies, you can use the other.

>”Version” as a verb is unclear to me. Save a version of what?

By “version”, I mean the process of time-and-date stamping of your project files in its various iterations – so let’s say you start on your FCP project at 10AM and you work for 2 hours. At the end of this time, do a File->Save As… and append the new date and time to the project file. What this does is it both saves another copy of the project file and gives you solid saved copies of the various stages of the editing process. So let’s say at 12pm you save a version, and continue working but realize you accidentally deleted an important sequence – you simply open up the prior version of the project file, copy the sequence and paste it into the new project. Versioning is standard operating procedure for editing, and is crucial as a backup strategy.

So if you’re backing up your project files to three redundant locations, as well as media if it’s tapeless, and properly versioning your project files regularly, you’re able to lose a lot of components and still be able to be back up and running shortly.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Did this originate on tape? If so, it has timecode and if need be, it can be recaptured. If this is tapeless media, and you can’t afford a solid backup solution like LTO tape, you may want to copy this to a few drives and keep them all in different locations.

Most importantly, keep copies of your versioned project files, as well as any nonrecoverable media elements in at least three different places. Everything without timecode needs to be in redundant locations.

Version every couple of hours to two places, like an internal sata and a usb flash drive, or a cd. At the end of the day, back up all the nonrecoverable items again and also to a third place, and bring that home, or somewhere else, so that the whole building could go up in flames and you could start recapturing or reconnecting and be back up, same day. Then again, I’m the paranoid type when it comes to these things.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Most of our clients tend to prefer the 17s for field editing; the extra space makes quite a difference when editing from a laptop, and besides, you’re not really saving all that much space with a 15. If you’re typing word documents or excel spreadsheets I might say stick with the 15, but you’ll want to give yourself a little more screen real estate for editing, even out in the field.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Where are you trying to save the file? Seems like this might be the only thing not changed, if you’re trying to save to some external device. Have you tried saving to another location?

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Which fibre storage network are you seeing problems with, and with what machines specifically? What are the issues?

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Using a hub or repeater won’t increase the performance of your firewire drives. You’re still sharing a connection and a single FW bus no matter how you do it.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Phillippa, if you’re trying to transcode to a different format other than your source while trying to retain good picture quality or mixing formats, we can’t help you without more info.

But if you’re trying to export without any recompression working in a common format, the above is how to export a full quality quicktime movie @ your source format without any recompression.