upgrading to Snow Leopard today

Ben_B

Ben_B

Veteran
I am planning on upgrading to snow leopard today so I figured I'd start this thread in case people had any questions about anything with it, etc, or need anything tried out in it (software, etc, that's free or that I have already :P) In any case i'm picking up a copy when i go home today and will be installing on my iMac and Macbook running Final Cut Studio 3 and Adobe CSwe don't care about it anymore, Love, Adobe3.
 
Hope it goes well for you.

While I'm really excited about seeing more ram and the other 64 bit benefits, I'm waiting for 10.6.1.
 
I'd like to know if you need to do a wipe when installing or does it actually install with your apps like some people seem to be telling me. Seems unbelievable. I'd hate to have to wipe my system.
 
Snow leopard disk has disk utility on it.

Best process I have found. (MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A TIME MACHINE BACK UP!)

1. insert snow leopard disk.
2. Go up to utilities in the top bar
3. Disk utility
4. Select boot disk and erase it.
5. Install snow leopard on said disk.
6. After the installation is complete it will ask you if you want to move files from another place.
7. Choose time machine back up and select your disk back up.
8. Enjoy

My computer is currently updating. I wouldn't suggest doing this if you've got a big project going on but it's never a big deal if you don't have anything crucial at the moment. You can always go back to the old OS. Only a few hours lost.

I have had to erase and reinstall boot disks many many times on many different jobs for various reasons. Of every method of bringing the computer back to normal I have found this to be the best. A lot of data structure issues you may have are gotten rid of by doing this erase technique. It works. Done it over 20 times in the last few years to many different computers.
 
Enjoying snow leopard on my macbook, will do iMac later.

Just to save people the momentary freak-out followed by google, followed by relief: your copy of quicktime 7 pro is waiting for you in the Utilities folder. It did not die. It has been renamed.
 
I went about it slightly different. I'm taking the opportunity to increase my hard drive space at the same time. I bought a new 320gb 7200 rpm 2.5" Hitachi hard drive and installed that into an external FW800 case. Installed Snow Leopard onto the external hard drive. When install is done, you can choose to move info over from another hard drive, which would be the drive still in the MBP, if you want (I chose not to, as I have all my user based stuff synced with MobileMe).

I'm still in the process of installing all my apps on to the FW800 drive, but the OS seems to run fine even that way. Once I get everything installed, and test a few things, I'll just swap the drive out of the MBp and put the one from the FW800 drive in. I'll probably shelve the old one for the time being, just to make sure.
 
Yeah I just ran the update. I didn't even bother booting from the disk (although I am sure it's technically doing that but it's pretty seamless when you hit install.)
 
I backed up all my data to my Time Capsule, as well as an external hard drive. Then I ran the installer and used Disk Utility (part of the installer) to erase the drive so I could do a clean install. MobileMe synced all my contacts, email, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Copied my docs back over and reinstalling all my software now.

Of course this is all on my Air as there's no way in hell I'm touching my editing workstation until there's proven drivers for all my hardware and probably will even wait until 10.6.1 and an update for FCS3. I have FCS3 installed now, but I'm afraid of complications from a combined new OS X and new FCS.
 
I am pretty sure FCS3 was designed out of box to be very compatible with Snow Leopard...anyone know if it supports OpenCL and/or GCD?

In any case I don't really see what the big deal is...if you break some stuff and you're not happy with it then just go back. As for backup, I don't keep anything critical (I used to but that stuff has been downgraded from critical to nostalgic or convenient) on my internal drives anyway...makes life a whole lot easier. As for everything else? Double backup of (at minimum) card data for all video, and triple backup for final cut files. Don't take too much.

Actually one of the reasons I like the GH1 despite the large file sizes of ProRes (even LT) is that keeping the card data backed up is so damn easy, and as long as you log in the same order you can reconnect no problem.
 
Someone posted this over REDUSER:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/

And here's a post about PS CS3 and SL from John Nack @ Adobe.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/08/pscs3_on_snowleopard.html

Maybe this means most of CS3 will be reliable and stable under the new OS, but regardless, I think I'll be waiting a little while before upgrading, even though I picked up a copy today.

Does anyone know what'll happen, if anything, to my XP partition (via Bootcamp) when doing an upgrade install (not a clean install) of SL? I've never installed a new OS in the Mac environment before (I usually just get a new machine).
 
I heard that the only problems CS3 has CS4 also has. In any case they broke my old versions when Leopard came out. I was pissed then. Did it get me to buy CS3? No. Did it get me to...well...let's put it this way: did I stop using Adobe products? No.

Hmmm. When companies decide to drop support of 1.5 year old products to get people to buy expensive upgrades they deserve whatever they've got coming to them...seriously.*

*Written on a perfectly legally purchased copy of Snow Leopard by a person who does not practice, condone, or endorse software piracy at least on forums where he uses his real name but also always without exception maybe.
 
Just because FCS3 may have been written for Snow Leopard doesn't mean it won't have bugs or issues. Right now I'm running FCS3 on 10.5.8. It's been very stable so far, which is great. But with Snow Leopard still being a .0 release there's bound to be bugs or issues. I'd rather avoid those and stick with 10.5.8. It's not like Snow Leopard is going to give me any new features in FCS3. If the new drivers for my audio interface and RAID controller get released any time soon maybe I'll give it a shot, but I'm not itching to disrupt things on my editing workstation right now when it's running perfectly.

On a side note, Snow Leopard seems to be very fast. Much faster than I remember a fresh install of Leopard being on the same computer. Also permissions repair properly now, whereas in Leopard Disk Utility would always show exceptions.

@Dingos - Your XP partition should remain intact. You may need to install a new version of Boot Camp though. I personally never do an upgrade. I always Erase and install. Might just be me remembering issues when I used to use Windows.

EDIT: Figured I'd check on those drivers. Apparently drivers for my RAID controller are built right into Snow Leopard. That's pretty cool. M-audio just needs to get their act in gear, and then I wouldn't mind experimenting with a different hard drive at least.
 
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Normally I'd be inclined to agree on the not install .0 versions except for the fact that Snow Leopard is meant to be designed to eliminate bugs, conflicts, and make things run faster... so I went ahead and took the dive :)

I managed to get a kernel panic when trying to use top sites in safari while doing smoothcam analysis in Final Cut and converting a 60p clip to 24p with Compressor.

When the machine came back up my compressor stuff was ready to continue as though it had never stopped, and final cut fired right back up where it was (not sure if I had a save as recent as right before it crashed but I probably did, all my queued smoothcam stuff was running again) but I had to rerender a few things.

All in all not bad for the Mac equivelant of a BSOD. Discouraging that it still happens...but nice to know that once the machine is back on again everything just keeps right on humming where it left off when you reopen your programs...at least compressor...which is, you know, the one where a crash could otherwise set you back HOURS (of processor cycles, not of labor.)
 
Upgraded to SL last night. Everything seems to be working fine.
Offloaded half a dozen P2 cards, ran around Final Cut for a while and everything looks good so far.

Much, much faster. dvxuser comes up instantly now.
 
You can put as much ram as you want in the macs but they can't assign more than 4 gig of memory to any one application. Certain applications get around this by using multiple cores. All macs and versions of mac os X are constrained by this limitation - until Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard is basically a ground up rebuild of Leopard that unlocks true 64 bit processing and therefore also allows apps to break past the 4 gig limit. There is plenty about this online, including the snow leopard writeup on the apple website
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#sixtyfourbit
 
Does anyone know if Final Cut Studio 3 supports OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch? Or will we get that in next downloadable update?

I know it came out pre-Snow Leopard but not much...maybe they included it?
 
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