Final Cut Pro: July 2011 Archives
The other day, one of our editors noticed that his FCP7 workstation was putting Autosave files in the Trash. It turns out that he had dragged his Autosave Vault folder out of his Documents folder to the Trash while Final Cut Pro 7 was still running–and FCP kept saving Autosaves to the old folder, even though it was now in the Trash.
This time, we were able to find his Autosaves and get his project back on track, but we felt awfully lucky that he hadn't emptied the Trash (and with it his fresh Autosaves).
To make sure your FCP7 paths are consistent, then, it's a good idea to close FCP before moving files directly in the Finder. If you forget, just close FCP and reopen it to force FCP to pay attention to the actual paths you have set up in System Settings.
In the wake of yesterday's entry, our students and instructors pointed out some more bugs that crop up when you run Final Cut 7 with Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5 installed. Here are a few quick workarounds for some of those bugs:
- Send To Motion–As soon as Motion 5 is installed, FCP7's Send To Motion feature breaks, and with it the easy roundtripping that makes the FCP/Motion/FCP workflow so appealing. FCP7 "Sends To" Motion 5, but it can't interpret Motion 5 project files. To fix this problem (and make FCP7 "Send To" Motion 4), just move Motion 5 to any location outside of your Applications folder–for example, your Desktop. You can always move Motion 5 back into your Applications folder after you're done working from FCP7.
- Boris/Boris Title 3D–When you install FCPX, the App Store automatically moves your old Final Cut Studio software into a folder called Final Cut Studio. This breaks some third-party plugins like Boris Title 3D. To fix the problem, you can move Final Cut Pro (7) out of the Final Cut Studio folder into the main Applications folder.
- 3-Way Color Corrector–We've heard a few reports that FCPX breaks some features of FCP7's 3-Way Color Corrector, especially the "Limit Effect" eyedropper. We don't have a solution just yet, but we're working on it!
So you're curious about Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5, but you (smartly) want to keep your production facility on the old Final Cut Studio until Apple can work out the kinks. Either now or later, you'll probably want to run FCPX/Motion 5 and the old Final Cut Studio in parallel on the same machine.
We and our clients haven't run into any serious problems running both versions, but there is one gotcha. After you install Motion 5, you may encounter an error the next time you try to launch FCP7:
The solution is simple: just create a subfolder in your Applications folder, and drag the new Motion into that subfolder. In the screenshots below, we've named the subfolder "Motion 5," but any name will do.
Once you've tucked the new Motion into a subfolder, Final Cut Pro 7 should launch just fine!
