Installing and editing with Final Cut Pro 7 on a new Macbook Pro with Yosemite

PVC by Scott Simmons

The lack of a DVD drive and a new OS hasn't stopped FCP Classic

It had been well over a year since I saw my good friend and longtime business partner Final Cut Pro 7 but this week saw the opportunity request to open it back up and work on a music video. Rather than try to convince the production to move to something else (believe me, I?ve tried) I jumped in! Then I noticed I needed to install it on my laptop ? that doesn?t have a DVD drive. Nor do I have an external one. It?s still possible and you can even update to 7.0.3.

This Final Cut Pro 7 job began on my old Mac Pro tower (seen in the image above) which is still running OS 10.9. I already had FCP7 installed on that machine but had to do a large part of the cutting on my laptop. It's running 10.10 and didn't have FCP7 installed.

I knew this day was coming so I began by taking the stack of Final Cut Studio 3 install DVDs and making a disk image of them on a hard drive. Yes there is that Remote Disc thing in the Mac OS where you can use another Mac?s DVD drive to read a disc from another computer but I?ve never tried that. Plus I wanted a backup of all the Final Cut Studio installers in case my discs went bad or the DVD drive on my Mac Pro went bust.

Once that was done I plugged the USB3 drive into my Macbook Pro and mounted the first install DVD. Final Cut Studio 3 is gigs and gigs of content across 7 DVDs but I only wanted Final Cut Pro 7 so it was a matter of only checking the Final Cut Pro install option. It took just a few seconds and it was installed. read more...


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