Final Cut Studio 2 and Snow Leopard

Posted on by Larry

As we all know, Snow Leopard was formally announced and demoed at the WWDC conference yesterday. So, today, Andreas Schmidt sent me this question:

Yesterday Apple announced Snow Leopard and Quicktime X. Do you know or have an idea if Final Cut Studio 2 will run under that OS or will it be necessary in order to run Snow Leopard to buy Final Cut Studio 3 once its announced?

First, Snow Leopard runs on Intel-Mac systems only, so if you are using a G-5 or G-4, you won’t be able to run the new operating system.

Second, Snow Leopard uses a (relatively) new language (Cocoa). However, much of Final Cut Studio is written in an earlier language called Carbon. (For instance, while I am not a programmer, I’ve been told that Carbon limits memory access to 32-bit, which is less than Snow Leopard will support.)

So, if you want to run Snow Leopard, you’ll need to upgrade Final Cut to the latest version – which has not yet been announced.

Finally, in answer to THAT question, Apple does not tell me when new versions of FCP will be released, but if I were to GUESS, I would say that we won’t hear of a new Final Cut Studio version until Snow Leopard is shipping. So, for me, I’m expecting an upgrade in the October time-frame.

UPDATES

Jonathan Eric Tyrrell sent me the following note:

I thought I’d should pass on the following information as Apple explicitly states that Snow Leopard will support 32-bit applications:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#64bit

For additional background, you might also like to read the following article:

http://daringfireball.net/2008/06/ins_and_outs_of_snow_leopard


One Response to Final Cut Studio 2 and Snow Leopard

  1. James Kohler says:

    It seems, in reading the data (on Snow Leopard) on the Apple site that Snow Leopard will still support 32 bit. Apple Claims:
    To ensure simplicity and flexibility, Mac OS X still comes in one version that runs both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. So you don’t need to update everything on your system just to run a single 64-bit program. And new 64-bit applications work just fine with your existing printers, storage devices, and PCI cards.

    With this I assume FCP Studio 2 would still run, even though programed in Cocoa. I believe many applications have been written in Cocoa as well. Photoshop?? for example.

    Jim

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