upgrading to FCP 5 - upgrade to OSX 10.4 needed as well?
 

Hello

I'm currently running FCP 4.5 on OSX 10.3.9. I am about to order the upgrade to FCP 5 but I was wondering if I also need to upgrade the OS as well. 10.3.9 is running like a dream, and I've read some negative reports about 10.4.
I know the specs for FCP5 say it runs on 10.3.9, but am I missing out on anything if I don't upgrade the OS? I'm inclined not to.
Thanks in advance,
Michiel

I gather that it works, although people initially had some problems. Hopefully they've been fixed with incremental updates. You do need QT7 however, and when you install FCP5 it will replace QT6 with QT7 pro.

I upgraded to FCP5 not long ago, and went to MacOSX 10.4 at the same time. It was really pretty painless. There may still be a rendering glitch in one of my high end 3d programs, but that was pretty much the only problem I remember. However I cloned my boot drive and then reformatted and did a clean install of 10.4 for starters. Then I let OSX migrate all my files from the clone drive as part of the install. The final step was installing FCP5.

I am generally like you though, I don't like to fix stuff that ain't broke, so I'm usually about a year behind in operating system updates. But in this case I just thought it made sense to be on the latest OS to avoid any possible incompatibilities down the road. 10.3.9 has been called "bastard child" by some people since it contains parts of 10.4 and is known to be problematic with some applications.

You might seek additional input from Apple's FCP support forum before making a final decision:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=939

10.3.9 and QT 7 or later. I ran FCP 5 before upgrading to Tiger with no problems.