Final Cut Studio Installation > question

[amoergosum]

Hi,
before I go ahead with the Final Cut Studio 3 installation I wanted to ask
if it's ok to choose an external hard drive as the location for the dvd, motion &
audio content. What would you recommend?
I would like to install the applications on the boot drive, use the second hard drive as my scratch disc and an external hard drive for the content.

 

[J the Ninja]

I would like to install the applications on the boot drive, use the second hard drive as my scratch disc and an external hard drive for the content.

That's the way to go. It should be pretty obvious how to do it in the installer, it will let you pick the location for each item. Although use a firewire drive for this, USB is not fast enough. And if your Mac has only one Firewire port, be forewarned some HDD enclosures do not like being in a daisy chain with your camcorder while you capture to that disk. I tried it with the Macally Mac Pro-looking thing, and it never worked. I got the OWC Mercury On-the-Go as a faster, more portable scratch disk for my MBP, and daisy-chain capturing has always worked like a charm with it. Hope your enclosure has a good chipset.

 

[amoergosum]

That's the way to go. It should be pretty obvious how to do it in the installer, it will let you pick the location for each item. Although use a firewire drive for this, USB is not fast enough. And if your Mac has only one Firewire port, be forewarned some HDD enclosures do not like being in a daisy chain with your camcorder while you capture to that disk. I tried it with the Macally Mac Pro-looking thing, and it never worked. I got the OWC Mercury On-the-Go as a faster, more portable scratch disk for my MBP, and daisy-chain capturing has always worked like a charm with it. Hope your enclosure has a good chipset.

Thank you for your reply.

 

[amoergosum]

I have one more question >>>

I just read this on a website:

"Ok, let’s get to installing. Double click the Install Final Cut Pro icon. Go ahead and click through the basic OS X Installation rigmarole. Choose your startup disc. Next it will ask if you’d like to install Apple Qmaster on this computer and make it available for distributed processing on the network. If you have multiple machines on your network with Final Cut Pro or if you have a multiprocessor Mac, you might want to say “yes” to this."

(Link to website: http://macmediacast.com/2009/02/final-cut-pro-installation/)



I don't have multiple machines. I'm running a 2 X 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Xeon Mac Pro. So would you recommend installing Qmaster?

 

[Sonicjay]

I have one more question >>>

I just read this on a website:

"Ok, let’s get to installing. Double click the Install Final Cut Pro icon. Go ahead and click through the basic OS X Installation rigmarole. Choose your startup disc. Next it will ask if you’d like to install Apple Qmaster on this computer and make it available for distributed processing on the network. If you have multiple machines on your network with Final Cut Pro or if you have a multiprocessor Mac, you might want to say “yes” to this."

(Link to website: http://macmediacast.com/2009/02/final-cut-pro-installation/)



I don't have multiple machines. I'm running a 2 X 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Xeon Mac Pro. So would you recommend installing Qmaster?

Yes; since you have four cores, you can define a virtual cluster on the single machine. See http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/using_compressor_with_multiple_cores.html

 

[J the Ninja]

Oh, you do have an MP? Throw that hard drive inside. Firewire scratch disks are a fallback plan, not the recommended way to go. An internal one will be much faster and more reliable. And probably quieter, since it has the whole chassis to stabilize it and muffle the noise.