Installing Final Cut Studio 2 - uninstall first?

After borrowing upgrades of Final Cut I finally decided to do the right thing and buy a full version of FCP Studio 2. The drive space requirements are huge - about 100 Gigs plus or minus.

2 questions. My existing version undoubtedly takes up a fair chunk of space.. When you do a complete install of a new version over an old, does it make sense to unistall the old first? The current install is a hodge podge of upgrades borrowed from other people for which I have no discs. I'm trying to free up as much disc space as possible.

The other question is: is there a way to store the massive amounts of "Content discs" (i.e. Motion Content, LIvetype Media etc) on a seperate drive? I've read here conflicting info - "livetype Media must be stored on your main hardrive" versus "Media can be stored on alternate folders of your choice". What I had in mind as a workaround is creating an alias folder labelled the same as the Content and placed in the same location FCP prefers on my main drive. Then place the actual folder and it's content on an external drive - the alias, in theory, pointing FCP to this location.

Does this make sense to anyone?

Steve

Steve,

Most experienced editors do a clean install of a major upgrade such as this, and I'd definitely recommend it given your situation of multiple bootlegged installations over a period of time. Some editor even do this every 6 months or so to maintain a clean and smooth running system.

To do a clean install, follow these steps:

• Clone your current boot drive. You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to make a bootable copy. This will serve as a backup should there be a problem with the installations to come later.

• Reformat your boot drive as Mac OS Extended with Journaling ON.

• Install the OS.

• Repair permissions

• Run Software Update

• Repair permissions after any updates.

• Start installing the applications.

• Install FCS. The applications contains in the FCS suite only require about 4gb of space. During the install process, you'll be given the opportunity to install the 55gb of extras on another volume if you want to do so.

• Run Software Update and repair permissions after each major install and update.

-DH

Thanks for responding David.

If I read you correctly your suggesting I wipe my entire HD clean to install the full version of FCP Studio 2. While this would no doubt be perhaps the absolute cleanest way of installing FCP2, I would prefer not to have to reinstall all my other software given that doing so would take more than a day. I don't have that time at this point.

Short of wiping the drive, is there any other way of installing FCP Studio 2 and removing the old version. I know that on PC's, for exampe, there is an "Uninstall" untility which does this with any software you choose. Is there something similar within the Install proces off the disks or another utility within OS 10.5.4?

Steve

Thanks, Ken. Much obliged.

Steve

Almost forgot - what about storing all those content loads (i.e. Motion Content, LIvetype Media etc) on a seperate drive?

-S

Steve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Almost forgot - what about storing all those
> content loads (i.e. Motion Content, LIvetype Media
> etc) on a seperate drive?
>
> -S


I guess you didn't rewad this from above: "• Install FCS. The applications contains in the FCS suite only require about 4gb of space. During the install process, you'll be given the opportunity to install the 55gb of extras on another volume if you want to do so."

-DH

Whoops. Sorry David. Long day.
Thanks again.

Steve