Final Cut Pro App Installation on External Harddrive

[verminofmsu]

I've got FCP and I don't want to blow 40 gigs of disk space on the program before I even start putting video. I only have 100 gigs. FCP says it will only install on a startup disk. Is it possible to make FCP installer think my 750 gig external is the startup disk? Can I install the operating system on the external with the Upgrade disks I have from Apple? Or can I use Time Machine to create a backup file and then boot up off that backup file.. Just looking around for solutions. I'd be indebted to any advice.

[xstep]

I have FCP Suite 5 and bought & installed a bigger internal drive in my MBP.

You could install OS X on that external drive and install FCP there, but I doubt it would be usable when booted from your internal drive. FCP is a nasty piece of work that installs support files into system directories. With enough knowledge you could probably build Unix links to the external drive from the appropriate internal drive locations. Good luck. Even if possible today, it could potentially be broken by an upgrade.

Time Machine does not create a bootable backup and the content it creates is probably not readable as a standard file would be, in that you couldn't use it natively.

If I wanted to save space on my internal drive and knew that I would not want to use FCP while away from my 750GB drive, I'd install OS X on that big drive along with FCP. Beware though, that you may cause your self headaches to keep things like e-mail, bookmarks, and appointments in sync if you use those on both boot drives.

The FCP 5 suite takes about 32GB to install, and I think FCP suite 6 takes 54GB. Most of that isn't the applications, but the support content such as fonts, audio effects, and Motion effects. Apple supplies a huge library of that stuff so that you don't have to spend thousands more on it out of the box.