Apple’s Lion, FCPx, and Adobe’s Production Suite

Yesterday, the new operating system, LION was released by Apple. With it’s release, Apple promised a set of many new features, including gestures, versions, and airdrop. For a production studio with multiple computers, the ability to easily transfer files between computers excited us.

The Plan

With the release of Lion, we decided to also purchase FCPx and the Adobe Production Suite. Before upgrading to Lion on all systems in the office however, we wanted play around with it on one computer and see if all of our software would be compatible. As for FCPx, we held off on purchasing it until the release of Lion as we were planning on doing a fresh OS install so our daily workflow was uninterrupted.

The Low Down

Three weeks before the release of Lion, Apple requested the return of all Snow Leopard discs. However, in order to install Lion, you need to have Snow Leopard installed. Luckily, we had a copy of Snow Leopard in the office.

The Install

We decided to use our multi-core Mac Pro to test out LION. Download time of LION was approximately 3 hrs, FCPx was about 30 minutes, and the Adobe Production Suite was about 3 hrs. Install of LION took an hour and Adobe also took an hour.

Functionality

LION: So far we are absolutely loving Launchpad but wished you could nest Applications beyond the one level or organization. This is something you are unable to do with the IPHONE/IPAD but we sure wish we were able to do this.

Our major concern at this point is whether or not all of my apps will work with LION. We have slowly been installing our apps and have not ran into issues as of yet but will be updating this post if we do run into issues.

We have only started to play with LION so haven’t experienced all of it’s features yet but similar to the APP compatibility, we will be updating this post as we explore more.

One thing to note when it comes to APPS is that Apple has dropped support for all PowerPC based apps as well as Rosetta so many older APPS will not port over at all.

FCPx: For now, we will not be using FCPx on a daily bases but plan on editing personal projects on it to familiarize ourselves with it.

ADOBE: So far, all apps seem to be functioning properly.

Although VERY basic, we have included step-by-step LION OSX instructions below.

HOW TO INSTALL LION with NEW HD:

1. Insert Snow Leopard Disc into optical drive
2. Hold down option key and boot from DVD
3. Install Snow Leopard
4. Update OSX.
5. Download LION: At the time of this post, LION was not available from the APP STORE and was only available through apple’s online store.
6. Install LION.

Overall

It is evident that Apple is trying to phase out optical drives as it is a fail point for computers. They have decided to offer LION for purchase on thumb drives starting in August for $69.99 verses $29.99 in the APP Store.

Overall, we are happy with LION. Our opinions are fairly fresh however as we only have about an hour of run-time under LION. We have heard a lot of negative feedback on gestures but have not tried them yet as we installed it on my Mac Pro. We plan on purchasing the magic track-pad before installing on my Macbook Pro’s.