Q: Will Mavericks run FCE 4?

There is no way to know at this time.

FCE 4 was released in Nov. 2007, in the Leopard era.  It was finally discontinued in June 2011, even before Lion was released.  Its code base goes all the way back to 2003 (Panther era).   Actually 1999 because its heritage comes from Final Cut Pro 3/4.  This is no longer supported software.

People have had some successes, some failures installing and/or using FCE on Lion or Mt. Lion.  YMMV.  You may as well just give it a try and see what happens.  You could even report back here about your experience.

No it will not work. 'Hope I'm not too late.

I don't know what would happen if installing from scratch. My issue was that an existing installation wouldn't run after updating to OS X.

The problem is that a couple frameworks didn't make it into the new install. They were hanging out in /Recovered Items.

I got it working again by typing the following into Terminal

sudo cp -r /Recovered\ Items/Library/Frameworks/ProMetadataSupport.framework /Library/Frameworks/

sudo cp -r /Recovered\ Items/Library/Frameworks/ProFX.framework /Library/Frameworks/

(and entering my password when promped)

Man I hope that works.... I'm sitting here itching to install Mavericks after upgrading to Mountain Lion just a month or two ago.... but I need FCE 4 to work since I can't swing the price of FCP X at the moment.  hmmmmm

I should have probably also mentioned that mine was an atypical install. It hung for 30 minutes at "about a minute" left, so I force-shutdown.

When I powered back on it had me log into my apple id, and then it just shut off. At the second power up it made me login again, but wouldn't let me use the same id, I had to create a second user and then delete it. I quickly realized that many of my applications and libraries had been removed and placed into /Recovered Items.

Well, I was pleasantly surpised last night when I decided to take the plunge and install 10.9 .  Took a few hours as is usually the routine for a large OS upgrade.  When I had restarted a second time after the system was live (just to make sure everything was clear), FCE actually fired up perfectly fine.  Now I haven't tried editing anything with it just yet, but it fired up like usual.  Actually didn't have anything dumped into the trash either under a "Recovered Items" directory.  The other surprise was that the old iWork 09 apps all worked too.  I still went and downloaded the new versions since they were free.  Looking forward to giving those a try though I really have no intention of linking everything to iCloud.  It sounds great in retrospect but I can't imagine trying to work up a complicated spreadsheet or word processing document on my iPad.  I think that would annoy me to no end, although I did buy Numbers for my iPad quite a while ago.

Sounds as though your install came with a few headaches.  So far the only app I've found that doesn't work is Sigil... a program I use for making ePub (ebooks) files.  Apple's done a really nice job on this OS.  My late 2009 iMac now seems even peppier than it did after I bought Mountain Lion a couple months ago.  Thanks again for sharing your info about the install fix.  Lucky for me it didn't require going into the terminal to fix (since I suck using that for the most part).

If FCE won't install normally, you could try installing with Pacifist which you can use in demo mode if you don't want to buy it  ........  you simply get a "nag screen" which delays its opening for 15 seconds.

Often Pacifist can install apps that the official Mac installer refuses to.

ANOTHER SOLUTION  ..........  use Disk Utility to create  another small partition on your hard drive .....  say around 25GB.

You can then install Lion, Mountain Lion or Snow Leopard on it and use your Mac in dual-boot mode,  booting into the earlier OS when you want to use FCE.

Note:  If you have bought the latest Mac you may not be able to install an earlier OS.

I'm running FCE 4 on Mavericks and it's working just fine. I didn't install it under Mavericks (I think I was on Snow Leopard when I installed), nonetheless it works fine.

FCE 4 seems to work OK with Mavericks except for one problem.

Every time I try to download video clips from my Sony HDR-XR260 using 'Log and Transfer' FCE shuts down.

This never happened prior to Mavericks and I am at a loss as to how to proceed.

Hope someone has a solution.

Wow, ironic you ask this question in this thread on this day as I just happened upon this thread today. I have the same camera and have been searching for a solution to this issue. The problem is that, I believe, you're trying to import a clip that was shot in 60p. FCE doesn't like 60p. If there are clips on your cam shot at this frame rate the app will crash and burn every time you open log and transfer.

I had this problem in lion and mountain lion as well.

I was able to find two solutions: 1) Shoot at 60i. 2) Use an MTS Converter app. I downloaded one called Pavtube that seems to work well. Might give that a try.

The only thing I'm unsure about at this point is that FCE has sequence settings for 60i but not full 1080 at 60p. I imported a clip I converted with Pavtube into a sequence set to 180 60i and it seemed to work fine. I get a message saying the file I'm importing isn't optimized for FCE but as far as I can ascertain that basically means the clip wasn't transferred and converted using FCE. I don't think it presents a problem.

Do you know if this  camcorder has a setting for 30 (well, technically 29.97) FPS? As that's pretty much the standard, might make sense to shoot at that rate, if possible, and avoid downconverting after/upon import. I just don't know if our cam will shoot at that frame rate. Any idea?

FCE at that size works with interlaced footage only, as you have found out.

If you look at each Easy Setup you will see the actual specs of footage required to work with that specific Easy Setup.

The Easy Setup when changed governs the settings of all NEW Projects and not existing ones.

A basic to remember with FCE is the Easy Setup and incoming footage need to match and there will be little issue.

Al

Thanks for the suggestions but I am confused.  I have only recently started using FCE so some of the comments don't mean much to me unfortunately.

As stated previously I have had no problems downloading video clips from the Sony prior to Mavericks.  These are all 1440x1080 at 25 fps and audio rate of 48kHz and 16 bit integer.

The latest attempts of downloading (since installing Mavericks) keep failing even though the clips on the camera are the same settings as all previous clips and shot at 50i.

Is there a simple(?) explanation?

Cheers