[Steven Gonzales]

Auto select on or off makes no difference.

[Steven Gonzales]

I think there is a different policy for institutions, and site licenses for institutional copies.

[Steven Gonzales]

Here’s the current policy, on the Final Cut Studio page:

“Academic and Not-For-Resale (NFR) versions are not eligible for upgrade.”

So previous they were not upgradeable — full price just bought you a new license, which replaced the academic license that you were no longer qualified to use.

[Steven Gonzales]

I wonder if there has been a change of heart, because otherwise the pricing scheme makes no sense. $100 discount is not worth losing the ability to upgrade.

I read the new software license included with the product, and there is no mention of upgrade policy.

The language about academic is this:

***Academic Copies: If the Apple Software package has an academic label or if you acquired the Apple Software at an academic discount, you must be an Eligible Educational End User to use the Apple Software. “Eligible Educational End Users” means students, faculty, staff and administration attending and/or working at an educational institutional facility (i.e., college campus, public or private K-12 schools).***

and the language about upgrades is this:

***Updates: If an Apple Software update completely replaces (full install) a previously licensed version of the Apple Software, you may not use both versions of the Apple Software at the same time nor may you transfer them separately.***

So I tend to agree, that the policy is probably what it has always been, which makes no sense anymore with such a small discount.

However, my official apple rep answer the question like this:

“The $899 version WOULD allow upgrades down the road.”

So that makes more sense, but I haven’t found written confirmation of his statement.

[Steven Gonzales]

After you’re done in Excel, you recreate the media end field with text concatenation using & sign in a formula:

=hoursCelladdress&”:”&minutesCelladdress&”:”&secondCelladdress&”;”&framesCelladdress

Copy and paste the new column as “values”, get rid of the columns you used for working formulas, and save as tab delimited text file.

Import batch list into FCP.

Good note, that you also need to change the duration field properly.

All goes to show that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, which is the motto of post production (except cat lovers hate that saying).

[Steven Gonzales]

For the sake of anyone else in this dilemma, in Excel I would take the end media field, and create 3 empty columns to the right.

Then select the media end column, and use “text to columns”, with colon being the delimiter.

If you have drop frame timecode, you may have to repeat this step on the resulting seconds;frames column, using semi-colon as delimiter.

Now make a formula that takes 3 seconds from the seconds column. Of course, if that column value is less than 3, you’ll have to “borrow” from the minutes column, and maybe borrow from hours

Formula to subtract seconds in new seconds column:
=if(secondsCelladdress <3, (secondsCelladdress+60)-3, secondsCelladdress - 3)

Formula to borrow from minutes in new minutes column
=if(secondsCelladdress <3, if(minutesCelladdress =0, (minutesCelladdress + 60) - 1, minutesCelladdress - 1), minutesCelladdress)

Formula to borrow from hours in new hours column
=if(secondsCelladdress <3, if(minutesCelladdress = 0, hoursCelladdress-1), hoursCelladdress), hoursCelladdress)

or something along those lines.

[Steven Gonzales]

One way to fake this is to use multiple users, with a different user name for each project, and then each project will have its own preferences.

But then you have to log in and out, or user switch but make sure only one user is using the FCP applications, so you gain a different aggravation.

[Steven Gonzales]

Thanks for the links, guys. I’m smiling with a big “I love the COW” feeling.

[Steven Gonzales]

Mark: When you’re not busy, it would be great to have a special report on your workflow here on the Cow or elsewhere. I make this argument, that there is no reason FCP can be used in groups, but I don’t have the details to back it up.

Thanks for the post.

[Steven Gonzales]

Export out a batch list, change the reels, import it back in is one way to accomplish this.