Running FCP from a Portable Drive

[Nathyn]

I am planning on buying a portable 2 TB firewire drive, partitioning it and installing FCP or FCE and After Effects on it. I have access to some powerful iMacs (think intel 2.25) and plan to hook my drive up to them and run the programs from the drive. What do you think about this?

-Nate

[NoahK]

That could cause problems with your preferences and general stability. FCS likes to be run from the system HD. Not to mention this could technically be a violation of the software's license.

Noah

[Nathyn]

Violation of my license? I pay all that money for it but don't get to run it where I want? Seriously? Well, once Apple gets my money, I'm sure they won't crumble and shut down if I put it on a portable drive. The technical issues could indeed be a problem. I didn't think of that.

-Nate

[DJDecay]

Won't work right. - ~/Library /System/Library and /Library etc are on your primary OS disk.
Relocating those paths, into which FCE installs 1/2 of its codecs and others it not an easy task.

I've seen this done with CS3 for windows where a USB-key "portable" product was made, but with windows one can cheat around Windows/System32.

I would not suggest doing this if you want a "stable" working system.

[NoahK]

Your license allows you to install FCP on one desktop and one laptop not shuttle it to any machine you want to- sorry. But anyways it's not really the legal problem so much as FCP does not run well as an app on a removable drive. It puts a lot of files into the system library so running it without a full install isn't going to work well.

Noah

[David Saraceno]

1. Must be installed on your system drive.

2. EULA states that must be installed on one laptop and one desktop owned by you and not used at the same time.

That's what you agreed to.

Pretty simple.

[Ted Spencer]

If you install the appropriate version of OSX on the portable drive, boot the computer from it, then install FCP on it, it should work fine. You'd want to do the installation while the drive is connected to the iMac though, so it does so with the proper settings. Each time you bring the drive to the computer, you'd reboot from it after starting up normally.

I did this on an external FW drive connected to my system with an earlier OS and version of Pro Tools (DAW) to cope with certain compatibility/reliability issues on the latest versions, and it works just fine.

[NoahK]

I dunno if it's my computer I wouldn't take kindly to someone coming in and booting if off a portable drive, but that's just me...

Noah