[Dave Mac]

Wow, this thread is getting a bit out-of-hand… 😉

A few points of clarification (hopefully):

According to an Apple rep. (higher than “base” tier support), you just need the previous “full” version serial number to install an upgrade license. You don’t need to go back to version 1, if that was your first full purchase.

The license for FCP (or FCS now) is stored in the file

/Library/Applications Support/ProApps/Final Cut Studio System ID

If you had FCS 5.0/5.1 (now considered FCS 1, though that was never the official name), and you install the $499 upgrade over your existing copy, the installer will find your 5.0/5.1 serial number and only ask for the FCS 2 serial number.

If you have erased your boot drive and are installing FCS 2 from scratch, that file doesn’t exist and you will need to provide your 5.0/5.1 serial number in addition to the FCS 2 serial number.

FYI (here’s an annoying tidbit of info), the crossgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 didn’t involve getting a new serial number. You only received a new serial number if your “crossgrade” was really more of an upgrade (versions of FCP prior to 5, the original production bundle/suite, other qualifying products, etc.).

This is how I found out about the serial number issue (I upgraded a standalone copy of FCP 4.5/4.0 to FCS 5.1 and received a new serial number). I also “crossgraded” my FCS 5.0 to 5.1 but didn’t receive a new serial number (after which I called and was told about this stuff by a senior Apple support rep.).

The icky part of the crossgrade was for people with multiple copies of FCS 5.0. They really only needed to get the new discs for 5.1. Any more than one set of discs was a waste of money (in most cases), as you didn’t get a new serial number.

In other words, according to the Apple rep., “Only paid, true upgrades come with a new serial number. And, to use an upgrade, you need the serial number from the previous version of FCP/FCS.”

I’ll stop now, as I am getting a little confused just trying to type this stuff. I hope I didn’t put too many of you to sleep… 😉

—

More to the point… FCS 2 is just awesome!!! Even if we didn’t get Color in the new version, the upgrades to STP, FCP, and Motion are well worth many times the upgrade cost (which should be recouped on one or two projects, especially for those who would use STP)…

Wow.

Best regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Dave,

Of course, it’s always better to have the fastest machine possible… 🙂

You should be okay… like Graeme said earlier, we all use transitions and do color correction on nearly everything, so things will need to be rendered at least at the end of the edit…

I believe that rendering in the sense of FCP’s real-time (RT) functionality is due primarily to the speed of your CPU(s), amount of available RAM, and, increasingly, the performance of your graphics/display card (disk I/O is probably secondary when considering render times or performance).

I’ll report back once I’ve done some testing (unless someone else does so first)… but, it may be more efficient to: (1) set rendering to use ProRes for HDV “native” sequences, or (2) place HDV and XDCAM HD clips in ProRes sequences… rather than having HDV or XDCAM HD clips in “native” HDV sequences (and rendering with the HDV codec or sequence’s codec). At least, this is what is implied by statements in the FCP 6 documentation.

Best regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Dave and Graeme,

Neither of you specifically mentioned what type of sequence codec is being used (i.e., native HDV sequence or native ProRes sequence).

In FCP 6, you can have a native HDV sequence with HDV or XDCAM footage and render using the “native” codec (say the sequence is an HDV sequence, or the first clip placed was HDV).

Or, you can have the XDCAM HD and HDV footage in the same sequence, but choose to render everything in that particular sequence using the ProRes codec (see Render Control tab of Sequence Settings).

Or, you could have a ProRes sequence and drop in HDV or XDCAM HD (or any other type) clips.

Of course, this doesn’t address the difference in render bar colors. It could be due, in part, to what I have described already, or may also be influenced by the ability of a particular system for performing RT processing.

—

As an aside, the FCP 6 docs suggest that rendering HDV or XDCAM HD clips in an HDV sequence (either HDV was the first clip added, or sequence was defined as HDV) is faster when the render control is set to ProRes, rather than HDV.

I wonder if the green bar changes color just based on the render control choice in this case… I’ll have to wait until tomorrow sometime to test this myself (when my upgrade arrives)… 😉

Best regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Chris,

Oops!

I should have been more clear about my “transcoding on ingest” comment…

I should have included “depending on your system’s hardware configuration” at the end of that sentence. Sorry for any ambiguity caused by that.

And, to be a bit more comprehensive, the HDV footage can always be transcoded using Media Manager in FCP, or via Compressor, into ProRes, for example.

Best regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Chris,

From my reading of your original post, no one yet seemed to answer your question. Or, having read the “Final Cut Pro 6 New Features” and “Final Cut Pro 6 Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats” documents, I have a different take on your question…

According to the Apple docs, you can ingest and edit native HDV (and XDCAM HD), as usual. In FCP 6, you now have the choice of rendering that footage in the ProRes codec (selectable in the sequence render settings).

So, you can ingest HDV as HDV, edit HDV and render HDV, or edit HDV and render ProRes.

Of course, as Jerry and others have already mentioned, you can transcode HDV footage on ingest (to Apple Intermediate Codec, DVCProHD, Apple ProRes, etc.).

It bears repeating that the two manuals I mentioned above, especially the HD and broadcast one, are very worthwhile reads… they often are overlooked, as they may not come as printed docs, but only as PDF files on the installation discs.

Best regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Thanks for the feedback.

I was able to download the updates using my serial number for a retail version of FCS 5.1 (no upgrade/crossgrade involved). I just checked again, and the page gives me the error message… so, it seems you get one shot at the downloads.

!!!!!!!
The existing issue, however, is that my crossgraded FCS 5.0 serial number won’t take, at all… no chances for download… so, there does seem to be a problem with Apple.
!!!!!!!

FYI, the updates did show up in Software Update. It is sometimes easier to keep a set up updates available in case I need to re-install FCS away from any Internet connection (or to avoid “needing” to be connected to the Internet). People with multiple copies of FCS, like me, may also find it wasteful to download the updates on each machine, rather than just once.

I still would like to know why my “crossgraded” FCS 5.0 serial number works with the Install Disc but not with the FCS download page.

-Dave

[Dave Mac]

Bryan,

You need to better understand the term “Universal” (don’t worry, you are not alone 😉 ). It doesn’t mean Intel-only. It means a program having code for both Intel and PPC based Macs.

Regards,

Dave

[Dave Mac]

Did you check the file permissions?

[Dave Mac]

David,

Glad to hear things seem to be working again. The system settings you tweaked likely have something to do with virtual memory usage and temp/cache files (nothing to do with FCP’s render or “scratch” files). Seems like quirky/buggy behavior with FCP. By changing the settings, some underlying system settings and temp/cache files likely get “refreshed/purged/recreated,” or some such thing…. 😉

It would be nice to know exactly what is happening, as this has been a recurring problem with FCP for quite a while. Would it be possible to try to get a clearer explanation from the Mac tech person?

I’ll try to remember this in case it happens to me (hopefully not).

It is curious to note that you had deleted the FCP preferences. Had you changed the default settings in the Memory & Cache pane before this happened? If not, it makes sense that the newly created preferences used the same/default settings (and didn’t fix things). I wonder if you had modified these settings from the defaults and then deleted the preferences when you encountered the problem that the newly created defaults would have fixed things “automatically” (since they were different from what they were last set to, in effect changing things under the hood as you did to fix things)???

-Dave

[Dave Mac]

David,

A few things you may have already looked into…

Check to make sure _all_ of your assigned scratch disks have enough room. Check scratch disks for fragmentation (and defrag if necessary). Check your media, especially still images, to see if any files are corrupt (not so easy to check). Check rendering on a different project, with an entirely different set of media (to see if things are related to your current project and media, not with all use of FCP rendering).

A few things I have learned that may apply here…

During renders, underlying QuickTime (QT) framework(s) perform a lot of the “heavy lifting.” QT creates a lot of “UNIX temp files” and virtual memory, which reside on your startup volume. If QT runs into a “difficult” piece of media, those temp files can quickly grow to be several hundred GBs (and cause an error). As FCP users, It isn’t obvious to most to be aware of underlying system operations and _their_ scratch (UNIX temp) files. So, your startup volume may run “out of memory” because virtual memory files and/or temp/scratch files for system processes (namely QT) are filling up the volume (not easy to track, as they get automatically deleted, for the most part, after many error messages are displayed and FCP/QT is quit).

So, having insufficient free disk space on your startup volume, even if it isn’t assigned as a scratch disk in FCP, may still cause problems.

You may want to open the Console application and watch its log window as you run FCP and attempt to render. Also, it may be instructive to run Activity Monitor while running FCP to see all of the processes, their memory and disk usage, etc.

Let us know what you learn. Good luck.

-Dave