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Upgrading to Final Cut Server 1.5? Check the best practices note first

Apple on Thursday released a new version of Final Cut Studio, its video production suite. In a technical support note posted the same day, the company reminded IT managers running Final Cut Server, of some "best practices" when installing the software.
Written by David Morgenstern, Contributor
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Apple on Thursday released a new version of Final Cut Studio, its video production suite. In a technical support note posted the same day, the company reminded IT managers running Final Cut Server, of some "best practices" when installing the software. On second look, we would do well to think "best warnings" as much as "best practices" here. For example, if the install is unsuccessful, "you will need to restore the database from the user-accessible backup made during the Final Cut Server 1.5 install." But wait!
-If the user-accessible backup creation is unsuccessful, do not uninstall Final Cut Server since there will be no backup to restore from during installation. Try creating a backup from the Final Cut Server preference pane on the existing Final Cut Server installation. -If the installer does not complete while processing the database migration, it's likely that there is not enough space to generate the database dump or the upgraded database. In this case, attempt the install again after creating additional space on the startup disk.

Note: You should only use the uninstalling and restoring from backup method if the installation is unsuccessful either during or after installation of the Final Cut Server files, but not before. Symptoms resulting from an improper installation could be subtle and include Final Cut Server not working as expected after installation completes, in which case examination of /var/log/install.log could give an idea of what happened.
There's a lot of discussion about the new flavors of ProRes variable-bit-rate codecs in the upgrade: Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy), Apple ProRes 422 (LT), and Apple ProRes 4444 (this is known as 4K, btw). Apple calls them a "family," which is sweet. If you're interested in the details of the new codecs, check out Apple's white paper on ProRes. Towards the end are some interesting speed test results, one on MacBook Pros (the new version of Final Cut supports multitouch on new MacBook Pros) and another showing the advantages of multiple processor cores for handling high-quality frames. More is better.
Today’s Mac notebook and desktop machines rely on multicore processing, and so the speed of a fast editing decoder must scale up—meaning that decoding time per frame should decrease—as the number of processing cores increases. Many industry codec implementations “hit the wall” and do not realize further performance gains as more processors are added, but Apple ProRes codecs continue to get faster as more cores are added ...
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