Final Cut Pro Installation
This is a chapter in the Real World Editing series.
In this post, we’ll cover the installation of Final Cut Studio on your Mac. We’ve got to start somewhere! You might say, “Hey, I’ve already installed Final Cut Studio, why else would I be here?”. Right you are. But you might find a few of the real world tips in this post interesting, and you might one day have to reinstall the suite, so it can’t hurt to take some notes.
So grab your stack of installation DVDs that came with your big black Final Cut Studio box. You’ll also need your serial number, which is on a sticker attached to a little included booklet called “Installing Your Software”. There are generally 2 stickers included; you might want to attach one to your manual, maybe stick one on your forehead. Wherever you’ll find it again.
Real World Tip: Something else I find handy is to save your serial someplace electronically — email it to yourself and archive it, type it into a text file and stick it in your documents folder, you can even put it in your address book. You’ve paid a lot of money for this software, so keep that serial safe.
Next you’ll note a PDF version of the Installing Your Software booklet that is probably still in your hand. The “Extras” folder contains lots of stuff, that we’ll skip for now, but I must mention the Apple Qmaster Node installer is in here — more on this great feature in a minute.
Additionally, all of the PDF User Manuals are in the Documentation folder. These will get installed with the suite and are always available from the programs’ respective “Help” menus.
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.
Real World Tip: We’ll cover this more in depth later – but Qmaster will allow distributed rendering on different computers on your network, or, when configured as a quick cluster, can send different parts of an encoding job to different processors on your Mac. All of this can speed up your encoding jobs.
Next is where we choose which applications to install and where. Here are all the programs in the suite. I’ve obviously got them all installed already, but I wanted to show you a quick tip that people skip right over.
Real World Tip: If you twirl down the triangle next to Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, or LiveType, you can see that there are additional media & template installs that you can turn off if you need the hard drive space, on a laptop, for example. The programs will function normally without this material, though you’ll be missing out on some great extras. Also most people don’t notice that you can change the location of these installs — another handy tip if you’d like to install all the extra Gigabytes on a drive other than your system drive. Good to know.
Note that in some cases you might have to reinstall the Final Cut Studio suite . . . maybe you’re troubleshooting an issue or you’re setting up a new computer with the Apple Migration assistant and you realize that everything works on your new Mac BUT Final Cut Pro. Just turn off all the extras and templates (they are all generally untouched) and only install the program files. They are all conveniently located on this one disc.
Click continue, and we’re off. If you chose the full install, get yourself a cup of coffee and plan on feeding discs into your Mac for a while.
Before you go off and start installing the Final Cut Studio Suite on all the Macs in your home or office, keep in mind your software license only covers one install. And you can’t be sneaky — all the installs of Final Cut Studio see each other on the network and will quit if you try to launch more than one instance at a time.
And before you permanently shelf that big black box with all the manuals in it, you should consider actually reading them. Apple manuals are well-written and easy to plow through. All the programs in the Final Cut Studio suite are deep & powerful — if you want to be an ace, read those manuals!
Next Up: Setup & Preferences – User Preferences
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Filed under: real world editing