Applications on external drive
 

Hi Folks,

I have an external drive ( Lacie ), and I have a question
regarding loading applications to the drive. Specifically, can I take
Final Cut Pro HD Express and install this on to the Lacie external
drive and also capture all my video on to this drive as well. My goal is
to be able to transport my video clips and the HD application and use
the Lacie drive on other Mac computers. Make sense? One other
concern. I currently have Final Cut Pro installed on the main drive on
my computer. Will installing Final Cut Pro HD on the Lacie external drive ( if this is possible ) create any conflicts with Final Cut Pro? Any input is greatly
appreciated. Glen

I'm not sure, but I suspect you would need to install a full system on that external drive, then boot from it when using the other computers. There are standard places in the filesystem where FCP and other applications keep their libraries and preferences so you would end up with different versions of these scattered across the different machines.

Also, it's generally a good idea to only keep media files on the drive you edit from and not applications and other stuff. But give it a try and see what happens...

There is no way you can install software on an external drive.
Software needs to be installed on a computer, and its internal drive.
thats why it's called "INSTALL". once installed, it is part of the system.

Well I don't think that's really true. You just need to designate the external drive as your startup disk, then boot from it. The Mac shouldn't care whether it's inside or outside the computer. Of course you will need to install the full operating system on the external drive as well.

I'm with Boyd.

You can install an operating system on an external drive just fine..I've done it. Then install applications.

But it is never wise to capture to the same drive that your OS is operating from. If you are capturing and the OS needs a system resource and goes to find it, dropped frames occur and often the capture is aborted.

Actually, that's "Sorta true". As others posted, many software packages must be installed on the drive you're currently booted from (or the drive partition... in the old days of OS 8 or 9, with all those damn extensions, it made sense to have a system partition for general work, and often another system for audio editing or severe photoshop work).

You can generally assume that something really CPU intensive or high-end is going to install a lot of stuff in your system. Pretty much anything that launches an installer.

However, some software packages don't use an "installer"... they just instruct you to drag the application from the install disk to your hard drive. Many of these apps will run fine off external drives.

But for the "portable editing disk" described in the original post, you'd need to have an OS on the drive... and as we all know, capturing and editing from the same drive that your OS and editor live on can be problematic.