Over at KenStone.net, David Saraceno has written a new article on “Reinstalling OS X and Final Cut Studio the Right Way.”

The first part of his series has been posted: “How To Create A Bootable OS X Firewire/USB Install HDD”. David writes:

“This tutorial suggests a long term strategy designed to produce a problem-free install, and a quick reinstall if problems should arise again — with the proviso that you spend a one time spare afternoon preparing the necessary files and materials. The strategy is intended to produce long term results and far less down time.”

You can read it here.

First, Apple releases the hardware. For instance, until the iPhone was released, the best App in the world had no where to go.

Next, Apple releases the operating system to support the hardware. Sometimes, in the case of the iPhone, the operating system and the hardware are released at the same time. In other cases, such as Snow Leopard, the operating system is released separately.

Finally, with hardware and OS released and available, developers – both inside and outside of Apple – can begin the process of testing, updating, or creating great new software. But only AFTER the release. The definition of beta software is software that continues to change. By analogy, you can’t build a house on a foundation that keeps shifting. The same holds true with software.

Apple needs to release Snow Leopard. Its under-the-hood enhancements promise a wealth of opportunities for developers to build on for years to come. And that’s the key market, initially, for an OS – developers. The rest of us should wait a bit.

As editors, we rely on our gear and software to work reliably to enable us to meet our deadlines. At this moment in time, we don’t know what software works and what doesn’t work with the new operating system. Every third-party developer is scrambling to test their products for compatibility, make necessary updates, and release, if needed, a new version.

It won’t hurt anyone to hold off upgrading for a while. Apple will survive as a company. Developers will have time to update their products. And we will continue to meet our deadlines using our existing software without worry.

Snow Leopard will be great. I’m looking forward to running it on my key editing systems. But not now. Not until a few months have passed and all the kinks are worked out of the system and third-party developers have all their plug-ins, drivers, interfaces, and hardware tested, updated, and working.

So take a deep breath. Force yourself not to install the update in the middle of a project. Wait. Because I’m really not looking forward to answering the email on Saturday that starts “I just updated to Snow Leopard and now I can’t open my project. What should I do?”

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

Apple today released QuickTime 7.5.5.

In typical Apple fashion, all they said about this release was: “QuickTime 7.5.5 includes changes that increase reliability, improve application compatibility and enhance security.

“This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users.”

My recommendation is to hold off updating to this version of QuickTime until we see if it causes any problems with Final Cut Studio.

You can learn more about this update here:  http://www.apple.com/quicktime/