Edit Geek by Dylan Reeve

Apple’s launch of FCP X and the End of Life of the previous Final Cut Pro product line has created a situation where many people are unsure how to continue. If you were reliant on Final Cut Pro 7 or earlier for your work, where to now?

There’s no clear answer to this, so let’s work through the most obvious options.

Do I need to move?
As has been very widely echoed in discussion about the new version of Final Cut Pro, your current version has not stopped working. So do you need to move to something else at all?

Maybe not. It does still work, and it shouldn’t just stop working at any point in the near future, so you can obviously continue your current projects in FCP7. But the future is much less clear. What we do know is that FCP7 has been discontinued – there will be no FCP 7.5 or 8. What it is today is all it’s likely to be. If you’re having difficulty with workflows now they aren’t going to get better.

Also you effectively need to freeze your system where it is now. While Apple say that FCP7 will work in Lion, there’s no guarantees beyond that. OS updates in the past have often caused problems with Final Cut Pro, as the application is EOL it’s unlikely that updates will be released for OS compatibility. Also new Apple hardware tends to be unable to run any OS version earlier than they were shipped with, so it’s possible that future Macs will not be compatible with FCP7 at all. read more...