View Full Version : FCE 4 on the atest imac 20"?


Phil Kay
June 12th, 2008, 06:27 AM
I'm extremely confused. I can't run my old FCE 3 on my new imac because it doesn't have a AGC installed. When I look at the requirements for FCE 4 I see I still need a AGC or PCI card.

I have the newest 20" 2.4GHz/2gb imac - can I run FCE4 on it? I'm about to head out to my local Apple store and get it but won't bother if it won't run......

HELP!!!!!

Boyd Ostroff
June 12th, 2008, 08:12 AM
I don't think there's any way to run versions of FCP older than 5.1 on the Intel Macs. It would have to run under "Rosetta" since it's not a universal application and that would seriously impact performance. When the intel macs first came out there was a lot of discussion of this, and evidently some people got it to work, albeit not very well.

The AGP graphics card is another quirk. Much older macs used slower graphics cards, so FCP 4 checked your system at startup to see if your machine had a newer card. But this is completely obsolete now since newer machines have fast cards which the old software doesn't properly recognize. There used to be a little program you could install to trick FCP into running on the newer machines, but this was still in the pre-intel days.

Unfortunately you will need to either use an older G4 or G5 Mac or upgrade your FCP software to work on your new Mac.

<edit> Oops - just read your post again and saw you were talking about FCE and not FCP. Sorry, I guess someone familiar with the different versions will have to answer you since the numbering doesn't correspond to FCP versions. Sorry about that!