Creating Disc Images of Final Cut Studio Disks

by Shnnon L Hartman and Jeff Davenport

Final Cut Studio is a beast. The program is packed into seven-dual layer disks weighing in at nearly 50 GB. Installing it takes time. Watching progress bars is not a joyous activity. Inserting disk after disk is not riveting either.

When you first installed Final Cut Studio that’s what you probably had to do. It took several hours to install everything. There may come a day when Final Cut Studio just isn’t acting right and you have to re-install.

You can drastically cut down on that installation time by creating disk images of all the Final Cut Studio disks, and saving them to an external hard drive.

Disk images are virtual copies of the original disks, but since they are saved on a hard drive, the read and write speeds are significantly faster than a DVD drive. The installer doesn’t know the difference between the real disk and the virtual one.

To make a disk image, open Disk Utility located in Applications/Utilities.

Disk Utility is a program that shows all of the internal and external drives that are connected to your computer.
Insert a Final Cut Studio disk. The disk will appear in the left hand column. Select the disk and then click on “New Image.”

Save the image onto an external hard drive. Creating the image takes some time depending on the speed of your DVD drive.

After all the disk images have been created, open them all up. The disk images will verify (you can skip this), and mount on the desktop.

Since they are all mounted at the same time, the installer will not ask you to insert each disk. Once it gets done with one it will immediately go to the next one.

Open up the Final Cut Studio installer from the virtual disk, follow the prompts, click install, and grab a cup of coffee. You don’t have to hang out by the computer. Come back in about 45 minutes and the installation should be done.

With no prolonged, mind-numbing progress bars, and no need to keep your computer company waiting for it to ask you for disks, disk images are the way to go when installing Final Cut Studio.

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