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
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