Snow Leopard and Final Cut
by BigJay 33
on
Aug 25, 2009 at 4:34:42 am
With the release of Snow Leopard 10.6 on Friday, I wanted to see how many people are planning on upgrading soon? I recently purchased the new Final Cut Studio and want to make sure I don't run into any problems with the OS upgrade. I am actually hoping it might give me some added functionality to the FCS suite. Any opinions on the new FCS and 10.6?
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by David Wegley on Aug 25, 2009 at 1:54:51 pm
While upgrading the OS (especially Snow Leopard) will be a great experience OS-wise, there can be lots of issues when it comes to FCP. First, Quicktime is getting an all new rewrite in OS X 10.6. FCP relies heavily on QT and it can cause a lot of problems when you go tweaking with that. Then there are always the changes to the core OS that also rely on QT. Then there always seem to be driver changes and if you have AJA or Blackmagic accessories they might not work for a few days or weeks while new drivers are written.
In my opinion it is always best to wait and let other people around the world "beta" test the new OS for you and let the bugs get hashed out in the first few weeks. Once that is done and Apple releases updates, go for it.
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by BigJay 33 on Aug 25, 2009 at 3:01:03 pm
Thank you David for the reply. I am excited for the potential 10.6 can bring with the 64 bit and refreshed QuickTime but it might be good to let others "test" it out first.
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Scott Anderson on Aug 25, 2009 at 8:29:44 pm
There's no guarantee that Snow Leopard will bring any additional functionality or performance improvements to Final Cut Studio at all.
Early on, there were reports of lots of people asking if the new FCS was 64-bit, and the Apple support folks were saying no - 32 bit only. If that's truly the case, and Apple doesn't have a huge surprise up their sleeve, we may only see very, very modest improvements at the OS level affecting all things Final Cut.
If Quicktime X turns out to be just a pretty polish on the interface, and the ability for people to edit their iPhone3G videos, there's going to be a lot of disgruntled editors who were hoping for something - anything - out of Snow Leopard.
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Phil Hoppes on Aug 26, 2009 at 4:23:40 pm
I was hoping that the release of FCS3 was going to be a 64 bit release. That appears to not be the case. I've loaded FSC3 on to Leopard and it works pretty good. I chanced just doing an upgrade as I just did not want to rebuild my whole machine. Looks pretty good so far. No issues. They finally fixed markers, which for me, was a big thing. Nice colored tabs.
I still think something fishy is going on inside Apple's FCS development group. I find it very, very hard to believe that the upgrades done to make FSC3 took an entire development team 2 years (really more than that if you figure how most development groups work) to accomplish. Me thinks that the real work, 64 bit, better integration, better UI, compositor replacement for Shake is in the skunk works and that is what the lions share of the dev team is working on.
Either that or Steve-o is looking to sell the whole group to Adobe so Apple can focus on iPhones..........
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Brad Buss on Sep 9, 2009 at 9:18:54 am
Yeah, I'm fairly, absolutely certain that Phenomenon, Apple's next Gen compositing software, = ...(drum roll)... Motion. To survive, the new Shake would have to be the equivalent of Sony's new slimline PS3; smaller and more efficient, upgrades, cheaper, and ... Blu-Ray support ;)
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Mitch Ives on Sep 8, 2009 at 11:29:26 pm
Scott pretty much called it. It appears that SL doesn't provide anything for FCP7. Not only is FCP7 not 64bit, but it doesn't appear to be "Central Dispatch" aware either.
More to the point is that SL's QuickTime X doesn't seem to have all the functionality of our current QuickTime Pro. When installing SL, there is an option to keep QT7, which apparently we want to do. This seems to be a reoccurring theme here. Livetype is gone in FCP7, but you can keep it when upgrading. If you do a clean install you lose it.
Apparently, we will have to wait for another version of FCP to get 64bit and all the support we want under SL. The question is how long? If it took 2 years to give us the minimal changes in FCP7, I wonder how long for a complete rewrite... 10 years maybe?
Other have said it, but I think Apple would have hard pressed to call FCP7 a 6.5 release. Giving it a whole number increment for what amounts to fleshed out features to things we already has is pretty gutsy. Charging $299 seems even gutsier. We paid it because we needed markers to finally work and a couple of other small things. Didn't feel good about it though... and that's the first time I ever said that about any Apple upgrade...
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Phil Hoppes on Sep 10, 2009 at 10:36:06 am
Mitch, based on some posts I saw on Apple's Discussion Forums I believe you can still have Live Type if you do a clean install of your OS, be that Leopard or SL. The trick is to start from the oldest app to the newest app. After your OS install, first install Shake, then get your FCS2 disk and only install Live Type and then get your FCS3 disk and install the entire suite. Live Type should work fine as well as Shake. You can't install Shake last or later as it uses some of the common library files that FCS uses and will overwrite newer versions of those files with older versions that hoses things up. Installing it first gets rid of this issue.
Mind you, I've yet to do this so I am not speaking from experience but in reading posts from others who have it does seem possible.
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by Mitch Ives on Sep 13, 2009 at 4:41:10 pm
Good info... especially on the Shake thing.
I just finished discovering some more variants.
On my 8-core, installing FCS3 (no, it's just plain FCS isn't it... that'll be confusing), LiveType was left alone and functioned perfectly. Installing the new FCS on my 17" Intel PB resulted in LiveType being completely removed! The app was gone, and most of the folders inside of the App Support/LiveType folder. I had to manually drag things from the 8-core back to the PB to get LiveType working again...
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by David van Akkeren on Sep 2, 2009 at 6:16:01 pm
Hey Jay,
I'm running FCS 3 and upgraded to Snow Leopard on Saturday, the only issue I've run into so far is that Quicktime X doesn't have an export function. But I found that Quicktime 7 is still available under "Utilities". (panicked there for a second).
I do love the new "services"! (check out http://www.macosxautomation.com/)
Re: Snow Leopard and Final Cut by BigJay 33 on Sep 22, 2009 at 4:02:52 am
I have seen some nice new features to the Final Cut Studio ie speed control in FCP and new markers. Also the ability to export to a variety of file types without tying up FCP is nice. I was hoping that after the long delay between upgrades from FCS 2, we would have more that what's available. It's sad that iMovie has features I wish were available in FCP
