final cut pro users with dedicated edit machine-please share set up thoughts

so, good folks, the 2.8 mac pro 8 core is in the studio!

i want to use this as a dedicated final cut pro tool.

but what else should i install?

i have a mac book pro. i could do a migration from the mbp to the mac pro and that would give the mac pro all of my email/airport passwords and permissions.

i imagine migration asst would also push ms office 2008 and final cut studio suite2 to the mac pro.

web/email/fcp suite/ms office/carbon copy cloner

what else should i install?

i want to keep this machine lean, green & mean!

any thoughts folks care to share as to how i should set-up my brand spankin' new mac pro?

thanks in advance to those final cut pro heavy users who care to share.

be well.

rob

What's the worry? I run just about every program you can imagine on my Mac and it runs fine, FCP included. It's not a Windows box where you have to worry about DLLs and all that other crapola. Install what you need to and use the original install discs, not migration assistant. Otherwise you'll run into sharing issues if both computers are on the same network.

Noah

Other programs you might want to install are:

MPEG Streamclip (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac OS X (http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html))
Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/mac)
Squeeze (Simple Video Encoding Easy to Use Encoder | Sorenson Squeeze (http://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-encoding/))
Photoshop (Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/))
Toast (Roxio - DVD Burning & CD Burning Software - Creator & Toast Software (http://www.roxio.com/))
ClipWrap (ClipWrap (http://www.clipwrap.com/))

I'm chime in as well: I'm CURRENTLY in the same boat as Noah: I have EVERYTHING crammed onto my edit Mac (which happens to be a white iMac 2.16GHz right now) and it works just fine.

My NEXT box will be an 8 core and I will be going to "Lean and mean" and couldn't agree more with the additions Boudewijn suggests. I also keep Mac the Ripper around for grabbing disc images from my own DVD archives when needs be.

The iMac will be staying in the edit room alongside the new machine (when I spring for it...) JUST IN CASE. That way, I can try out new QT and FCP updates BEFORE I install them on the main box. As well, I'll probably leave the 8 core off the internet EXCEPT when I need to download updates et al.

Just my 2 cents...

I forgot some other very handy tools:

Perian (Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components (http://perian.org/))
Flip4Mac (Telestream Flip4Mac WMV - Overview (http://www.telestream.net/flip4mac-wmv/overview.htm))
VLC Player (VLC media player for Mac OS X (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html))
Apple MPEG 2 playback component (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/)

and since you will be going online you might also want to use FlashGot (FlashGot - Best Firefox Download Manager Integration - what is it? - InformAction (http://flashgot.net/)) for getting videos from websites.

Perian (Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components) = POISON

don't do it.... just don't. it will cause problems with FCP

Perian (Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components) = POISON

don't do it.... just don't. it will cause problems with FCP

What sort of problems? I have it on an Intel MacBook Pro and a G5 and nothing adverse has happened (yet).

weird ones. DV codec problems, other generic QT failures like exports that don't complete. typical " this used to work before but doesn't now" type things. .... "oh wait, I've got the perian codecs installed, I removed them, everything works now."

I've heard that story quite a few times. unless you are getting some old QT's or odd codec clips from some one else and you have to work with them, I'd remove perian. its really got no net gains if you don't have to open up QT codecs it supports and you can't get anywhere else. even then, export to a standard codec, then remove perian.

also qt pretty much supports everything Perian does.... and between VLC and MpegStream Clip you are pretty much covered.

I stand corrected then.
Allthough I never had any of the problems that you described on 4 different setups (yet).

As an earlier post noted, you don't have the registry or other nightmares of Windows on a Mac, so it won't slow things down to install a bunch of software.

It's been my experience over many years working in an environment with many Macs that you need to be careful about two things: first, make sure you have around 30 percent free space on your boot drive; and second, ALWAYS clone your drive as a backup before running software updates or upgrades. Apple is very forward-looking and usually doesn't do anything to accommodate legacy products or software when they introduce something new.

The only problem I've had has been very minor. I edit on a 17" MacBookPro, with a 23" Apple Cinema Display monitor and some firewire drives, remote keyboard and trackball. Two different times when I've installed something that has been downloaded, there has been a problem. First time it was after I had installed Flip4Mac Pro. I don't remember what it was the second time.

What happened was that new footage I captured would have a weird pulsating thing going on. The simple fix was to trash the FCP preferences, and then all was well. The downloaded software worked fine too after that. Apparently on this computer the act of downloading and installing some types of software causes the need to trash the preferences. I've installed lots of other software with no problems. Trashing preferences is probably something you should do on occasion anyway. Ken Stone's site has exact directions.