Friday, June 24, 2011

How To Run Final Cut Pro X on Non Open CL Capable Cards

Hardmac has an article up describing how someone discovered that, while slow, FCPX and Motion 5 can run on a Mac without a video card that supports Open CL.

"Yesterday I was unable to install Final Cut Pro X on my Dual-Core Mac Pro Intel Xeon rev. 1.1 (from September 2006) because the graphics card is not compatible with OpenCL. I created a session with my name on a friend's recent MacBook Pro and bought it with my iTunes account to test it on his computer and buy it on mine after would have changed the graphics card.
Today I put the MacBook Pro in target mode to transfer some video files.
Then, from my Mac Pro, opened the Application folder of the MacBook Pro and I was able to launch the Application!
I then copied it in the application folder of my Mac Pro and tried to launch it again, it worked!
I went to the software update menu and the other softwares were installed!

For Motion, a 10 seconds animation is read in 23 seconds in Motion 5 on the Mac Pro.
Graphics cards are important, but since I am not a professional, it is plenty enough for me. I understand that Apple didn't want that lower performances with older hardware would be officially possible.
On the MacBook pro 5.2 (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz), the animation is read in real time, 10 seconds."



I'm unure of the complete legality of this but it's pretty interesting. It would likely be too slow to be of any real use though in real-world editing.

Apple has a support document here which lists cards that do support Open CL.

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