Partition drive to run FCP7/FxFactory on old OS?

We have a mid 2011 27-inch iMac running FCP 7 & FxFactory 4.1.9 software on El Capitan 10.11.5 with projects on external drives.

Recently "Local Contrast failed to render" red text box appeared in a project. FxFactory reps could not source the cause of the problem after reinstalling FCP7, updating El Capitan, checking 8bit rendering, etc.

An option remains to partition the drive to accommodate OSx 10.7 and install FCP7, then boot from that drive and open the project so FxFactory software can recognize and render the files. An Apple rep was concerned doing this could cause confusion in the FCP7 library files which are native to the current internal drive.

Would it be possible to copy all FCP files from the current drive to a partitioned drive with OSx 10.7 and run our projects from external drives where the video,audio,pic media is held?

Any suggestions on making this option successful?

Thanks!

I doubt that FCP7 running under OSX 10.7 (Lion) will call files in another volume before locating them in its own volume. And what FCP7 library files would be "native" in El Capitan but not "native" in Lion? However, if FCP7 does do what the Apple rep fears, you can stop it. Most simply, you can unmount (or eject) the El Capitan volume whenever you run Lion. Or you can prevent your Lion volume just from accessing programs in the El Capitan volume. The nice, inexpensive TinkerTool System software automates these operations.

I doubt it's necessary, but to be absolutely sure your new FCP7 installation is completely in the Lion volume, unmount all other volumes when doing the install.

External vs. internal drive is not relevant. This is a volume-by-volume matter. Your El Capitan volume might have priority for booting, say after you reset PRAM, but it is not the center of your universe. You can sit in your El Capitan seat or your Lion seat, etc. That's the best thing about Macs, in my opinion.

Complications arise with hardware, that must run and might be incompatible with one or the other OSX, but for software you can decide which OSX suits it best. I found Lion to be the last OSX fully compatible with FCP7.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Good news! We created a partitioned drive, reinstalled Lion 10.7.5, FCP7, FxFactory and the render error issues are gone. It's all software compatibility and Apple is not taking care of its legacy customers with updates. Best to do the above steps to live in both worlds.