We'll have to see if a FCS update follows......

Apple to Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard on August 28 (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/08/24macosx.html)

I've already pre-ordered.

I'm first going to wait to read some reviews though, to hear if it's stable in the first point release. And very curious to the effects for the Pro Apps, if any.

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro 13" and I have installed FC7 on it. It isn't a production machine at this point, so I wasn't nervous about jumping into the new version. I'm going to upgrade the OS on it and see what happens. I haven't even had time to load a real project on it to see what happens. I have been hearing good things though.

I think I hosed something in my FCS3 upgrade (with my seemingly endless blu-ray encoding problems), so I was planning on doing a clean install anyhow. Might as well go for broke and test this out :)

Do we know if Snow Leopard/Quicktime X is going to help speed up H.264 encoding? I have read about certain Nvidia cards helping with decoding, but I wasn't sure if it went both ways. I have been looking at the Matrox Compress HD card for a while now, but I've read about some issues. The fastest Nvidia card is around $450 and the Matrox card is about $500.
Right now it comes down to 3 things:

Will SL/Quicktime X compress faster
Will a faster Nvidia card help out
Matrox Compress HD