[Eric Weiner]

Hey thanks for the help! I was using media browser to ingest but that could defiantly have caused that as well.

It took a few days of noodling around with it, but I fixed it. Turns out the folders above the main card folder had weird characters in it. (dashes) Also the drive with the footage I was given back had a slash in the folder name above that folder. Taking the slash out when I moved the drive broke it, so I had to put it back in. But I found one dash worked, but two dashes in the folder above broke it.

I don’t 100% understand what was going on, especially when I had to add back in a slash to make it work, but if you get a similar problem, check the folders even above the main card folder with P2 stuff. If there is a weird dash, try adding or subtracting one. So Weird!

[Eric Weiner]

I did the first one, installing FCP7 directly in to a fresh install of Mavericks on a brand new 27 inch iMac. (The iMac came with Mavericks 10.9.2 installed, and I just went forward with that.)

Actually now that I think about it, I’ve done it twice. I did it last Friday at work, but I also installed FCP07 onto a fresh version of 10.9.0 last December on my brand new 27 inch iMac I bought for home as well. (Using the same Tech drive to do so.)

I have another personal main computer at work where I upgraded the system from Mountain Lion to Mavericks (did that in early 2013) as well, and that worked fine.

(Again, I have experienced the problem with compressor under Mavericks in all cases though.)

So I gather my experience so far does contradict what you have read before.

Oh, and so far I can only say this worsk for the new iMacs. I’ve ordered two mac pros but they don’t ship until mid-april so there is a chance that FCP won’t install on them for some reason I guess.

[Eric Weiner]

I just fresh installed FCP7 straight onto a fresh install of Mavericks yesterday using the method I just laid without a problem. I didn’t realize this was an issue people were having trouble with.

Of course it’s easy for me since I set up my tech drive install disk years ago, having to go get a hard-drive, and a mac with a DVD drive, and 3+ hours to move all of the DVDs to the drive is kind of a pain in the ass to install FCP7 once.

If you have an external DVD/CD drive attached to your iMac you can’t install FCP7 the old fashioned way?

I should mention that the iMac I set up yesterday does not yet have my Black Magic Intensity Extreme or UltraStudio Express devices installed yet (Just ordered those they should be in next week) so there may still be a problem in Mavericks with that I just don’t know about yet. (A problem other than the compressor issue which is a pain in the butt for sure…)

[Eric Weiner]

I’ll answer that question! But first an update, I’ve since purchased high end iMacs, and two high end Mac Pros.. They are mostly still shipping but we did get one iMac in this week. The iMacs will be for FCP7, and the Mac Pros are for our Graphics and 3D animation guy.

So here is how I install FCP Studio 3 on to the new iMacs.

There is not DVD drive on the iMacs, and I didn’t get an external DVD drive. Instead, and I did this a long time ago, I’ve created disk images of all of the FCP install DVDs onto an external tech drive.

Since our place has about 7 edit bays, I am in a situation to have to clean wipe and re-install the needed software onto them on a fairly regular basics. So one day I grabbed a external 240GB portable drive with firewire 800 (starting to be a problem now) and split it into 6 different partitions. the first 5 had about 15 GBs and the last one had the remaining amount of space. Then I installed the latest mac systems on the first, tiger, leopard, snow leopard, and leave a space open for lion since that was coming out soon when I did this. That’s been extremely helpful to me since I can attach it to almost any computer in the place and boot from it. These partitions aren’t important to installing FCP, I just wanted to mention them because I thought it’s a cool idea.

What is important to how to install FCP, or any other large DVD based application is what I did with the last partition and bit of space on the drive, I uploaded every major and small application or application installer I needed when I set up a computer from a fresh install. I also used to install Adobe Creative Suites before we moved to the cloud.

Here’s how you do that. You need to have a mac that still has a CD/DVD drive. You mount each FCP studio 3 disk one at a time onto this computer, and open Disk Utility. (Disk Utility is in the utility folder in your application folder.) From there you select the DVD in the disk utility window and click the disk, the one that has the name of the disk, then click “new image” across the top. A save window pops up, and you want to select DVD/CD master for Image Format, and none for encryption. You then want to save this .img file to your dive. (or to you desktop and move over to a drive later) Do this for every disk, each disk will take a while, this whole process can take just a bit longer than installing FCP 3 from DVD.

But here is the pay off. Once you have all of the disk images on the hard-drive, you simply connect your hard-drive to your computer, open all of the .img files at once (they will mount disk images to you computer) and install FCP by clicking on the first disk. Besides the fact there is no dvd switching, the entire process speeds up from a 3 hour process where you have to constantly switch DVDS, to about 15-30 minute process where you don’t have to do anything after you set up your install. For extra convenience, put a .txt file on there with your FCP serials so you don’t have to go look though up separately.

On a different note, there is one problem with FCP Studio 3 and 10.9. The qmaster control panel doesn’t work any more, meaning I can’t seem to set up quick clusters in compressor any more. We didn’t use the share over the network render options of Compressor, but we DID use quick cluster so that when making a H264 link it would split the file into several pieces and work on them all at once. This really speed up the speed of compression, about 4-5 times faster then if you just used “computer only” That option is gone from FCP Studio 3 and it’s a pretty big blow for us really, we make links of 30 minute shows several times a day and it saved us a good 30 minutes a person at the end of the day in compression. I looked into a way to get it going again a month or so ago, I’ll do another search to see if a solution has come up yet, but as far as I know it just doesn’t work any more. I’ve spent about 4-5 hours looking for a work around using the Q-master application myself but Q-master doesn’t seem to come up with the same options in 10.9 as what I see should be there from the manual. I’m going to need to look into other applications that speed up H264 transfers, and just take the speed hit when I transfer other footage to Pro Res for edit.

It’s not something that completely breaks FCP Studio 3, but it’s a sign that they are absolutely not concerned about making sure FCP7 work with the new systems, I’m guessing that the next operating system will no longer work with FCP7. I’m trying to get my boss to see that FCP7 days are numbered, not sure what we will move to. Premier, Avid, and FCP X are all options at this point. I’m leaning towards Premier since most of what we do comes out of AE anyway.

[Eric Weiner]

Cool, according to Media Info, those raw files are progressive. (Which is what makes sense to me, and what the file looks like when I play through it.)

When I drop the same file into Final Cut, it comes back with the file being lower, and in compressor it says it is upper…

Something about Media info makes it more reliable?

[Eric Weiner]

I have the same problem, and just bite the bullet and separate out folder manually into bite size chunks. I have a Cache-A unit, which can also span tapes, but if you lose one of those tape in a span for what ever reason, you don’t only lose the tape, you lose everything it is spanning too. I keep a very detailed log with instruction on how to re-stich a tapes together in the same folder structure.

Pain in the butt, yes. But as far as I know all LTO tape solutions that can span tapes in the affordable range (less than 10K) have the same issue with each tape being criterial to back up.

[Eric Weiner]

Hey, thanks for the heads up. We ended up using Extreme Reach, which is a company that seems to specialize in delivering this kind of content. We uploaded a pre res file, and they did the rest. I had to convert to 59.94 fps, as their standards called for that for 720p, and 29.97 for 1080i material. Seemed strange to me, but I’m not going to question it. I would recommend, I think it cost around $125 for hd, and like $14.00 for SD files. (rush prices went up a lot.)

[Eric Weiner]

First of I agree with Shane.

If you edit with the MP4, you’ll need to compress it to a more FCP friendly format. Basic rule of thumb is garbage in garbage out. You won’t be able to get a higher quality than the highest quality footage you started with. So look at those MP4s, the final product will look worse than those because you need to compress it. If you are happy with that quality you could re-compress and edit with it, but my guess is that you’ll want to wait till you get the higher res stuff.

[Eric Weiner]

As far as I know there isn’t a way. If there is I’d like to know about it because I run into these sort of things sometimes as well. (I often would like to have a text edit program open taking notes while a file plays in FCP as well) If you don’t expect to make a lot of cuts, the quick-times won’t be a big problem. In the past I’ve done my cutting on a desktop and browsed on my laptop.

[Eric Weiner]

When you say:

“When we brought in clips from other edits (projects, bins, sequences, sub-clips, etc.) the audio was out of sync altho the program said it was in sync. When we played them in their original places they were in sync.:

Do you mean that when you view them on the original computer they were cut on they were in sync, or that they were in sync in the original project file but not in sync when you copied those resources into a new project? How did you bring in the clips from the other edits? Can you elaborate a bit on that part?