Is now the right time for me to update to Mavericks and 10.1?

Hi friends,

New to this board, but I've been reading it for a long time as a guest, and I'm a huge fan of all the people here and how much great advice there is to be found.

I locked picture on a feature film project that I edited on Final Cut X Pro. I'm running a completely maxed out 28 inch iMac with 32GB of RAM. The feature was shot on 4k and 5k. Unfortunately, it was imported and set up by our asst editor as a 5K FCX project. So I've been dealing with that for months. But now that we've laid the film off and it's with our colorist in NYC and our sound team out here in LA, the only thing I find myself doing now is using the project to test things and to answer questions they might have. For instance, if something didn't get translated in our XMLs, the colorist might call me to ask what the missing clip is at timecode XXXX. Or, our Sound team will send me an audio stem of Reel 3 to check it out, and then I'll import it as an mp3 and drop it into my project to marry with picture and watch.

I tell you all of this because I'd really love to upgrade now to Mavericks and then also update to 10.1 (I'm on 10.9 right now). But I know it's sort of a cardinal sin to update OS's and Final Cut versions if you're still working on a project. But being that the film is locked and I'm just doing things like the above tasks, would you say I'm safe to upgrade?

The only 3rd party software I find myself needing at this point is X2Pro Audio Convert. So let me know if you'd recommend I upgrade or hold off yet till the film is done and DONE. Reason I really want to upgrade is to be able to detach audio from my multicam clips (which comprise about 75% of our finished project) as well as test the speed improvements and new library structure. I'm leaving for NY on Monday for the holidays, and I had planned to move the entire project to a passport drive that I can then work off my laptop from, while home with parents for Christmas.

So I guess that's another, more specific question: Would the new Library structure make sense/be better if I'm about to copy events/projects over to another drive to I can do work from the road on my laptop?

Thank you.

Well I can only point out a few things that might help you focus your decision. Worst case scenario (assuming all your media, events and projects are on a SEPARATE media drive) is that you upgrade, and have to backslide to ML/10.0.9. That also assumes you've spent a hundred bucks on a drive that you've cloned your current system drive on to. FWIW I upgraded my Macbook Pro and it was fine - all projects OK and they converted easily into libraries etc. But I had nothing 'mission critical' on there.

If you approach it this way I'd say it's pretty low risk. If you've no clone - well it's not easy going backwards with the OS. So that may be pause for thought there. Seriously - cloning a drive will be the best $$$ you ever spend when you come to need it. It will hopefully be a complete waste of a hundred bucks as you never will - a bit like any insurance really.

I'd also be a little wary because, of course, you can't undo the upgrade of the library structure to the new paradigm. So that may be something you want to consider - can you clone the media drive too to enable you to have a safety copy unaffected? If the media is referenced and not in any way optimised or transcoded, you might be able to get away with a backup of the event and project only (much smaller if you junk render files etc. first) as the media should be unaffected by any upgrade.

I can't answer your last point as I haven't tried moving projects around in that way - but I think it should be far more straightforward from everything I've learned whilst mooching around the inter web.

Adding to Jason's excellent points I can confirm that X2Pro works with FCPX 10.1.

Having backups of both your system drive and your media is a MUST, especially if you are dealing with larger projects. Drives can fail, it's not a matter of if they will fail but of when they will fail. And drives are cheap these days, so there is no excuse for not making backups.

Since the final release of 10.1 we have been updating some huge projects without much trouble, so I would consider it safe to say that you can update this project without any worries if the multicam detach audio feature is important for you.

- Ronny

I would say it's pretty safe if your events are using external media (non media-managed in the event) for the simple reason that the events are much smaller and easier to manage if something goes wrong. Also, if it's external, you don't even have to touch those drives where your media is stored; FCPX will simply update your event/projects into the new Library system, wherever they are located. In this case, I would make sure your events/projects are well backed-up should you want to go back. IMO the update to Mavericks has been stable. The important thing is to have a good "go back to previous version" plan.

I just went through this process with a 4k/5k RED project (like you, it's not something that I normally do mid-project). I felt that with 10.1, it would be better for a large project with many clips, and so far, it's a LOT faster.