pro is definitely worth the little $ it costs. It's a great conversion utility if nothing else.

You don't NEED pro for any of the pro apps at all. I don't see the issue unless your wanting to "present movie" or use it as an encoder. I just use FCP to encode and it works fine. I can do without "fullscreen" for a couple more weeks. Not an issue if you ask me.

My 2 c,
Eric James

Obviously if you plan to buy FCP 5 and can wait another month then it makes little sense to buy QT Pro now.

On Apple's FCP support board several people are saying that installing Quicktime 7 under OSX 10.3.9 causes firewire output to break in FCP HD 4.5. Might not be a good idea to jump into QT 7 unless you have the time to troubleshoot things like this...

ccc
 

I am installing TIGER right now and thought I'd come over to the forum and kill some time while it downloads. It occured to me that I always make a copy of my existing OS befor I upgrade. I use carbon copy cloner; it's free! I got it at version tracker. So, it would be possible to use panther for fcp, and tiger for other things. You could probably reinstall your original OS and update it to 10.3.6 (seemed to work best); reinstall your pro apps; clone it to another hard drive; then upgrade to tiger; you would have the best of both worlds.