I have an old 2002 iMac, 800 Mhz, panther OS, & use FCP 4.5 HD to edit video. It's not the ideal system but provides a good cheap platform for my learning to edit video.

I want to cut a bunch of my home movies to clips & render them into MP4 format to play on Ipod. I believe i have to upgrade my quicktime from 6 to 7 in order to use QT7 to render clips. However i read some posts in this forum that QT 7 is not compatible with FCP 4.5. I don't want to install QT 7 & start experiencing problems if i can avoid it.

To the greater minds on this site, what would be your best advise for me to get to rendering clips for Ipod, with an eye on my budget? Can i just upgrade software? or do i need to move to a new machine? The changeover to intel is making a decision on this more difficult. I don't want to have to buy a new $2000 mac & $1200 on a new FCP. I would prefer to keep my current imac 800/FCP 4.5/panther platform.

Thanks in advance for your comments. -JW

I don't want to install QT 7 & start experiencing problems if i can avoid it.

You know, this was discussed a lot when QT7 and Tiger were released, but I'm getting a little hazy on the details now. I *think* Apple issued a couple "propps" patches for FCP4.5. Use software update to install them, or just find them on Apple's download site and make sure you're updated to the final version.

But I know there were a variety of issues with QT7 vs FCP4.5 initially. You might search Apple's support forums for discussions from last year:

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

I don't want to have to buy a new $2000 mac & $1200 on a new FCP.

I can't help you with the hardware price, but you can upgrade your copy of FCP 4.5 to the full Final Cut Studio (FCP, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro) for $200. This will be the universal version which runs on both Intel and PPC:

http://www.apple.com/universal/crossgrade/

Now, does that $1,000 savings affect your hardware decision?

Joshua, the best option for the best price would be for you to download iSquint, it's free and will render a lot faster than Quicktime Pro.

Guys,
thanks for taking time to respond. Isquint sounds like the way to go. I have a problem with "fixing" something that is not broken, so if i can avoid upgrading my OS & FCP software, this is ideal.
-Josh

QT7 is compatible with FPC4.5. I've been running that combination on my computers at work for months now. Just make sure to download the package from the Apple website and install it instead of using the Software Update. I don't know why the Software Update doesn't work correctly, but no one who installed the package manually seemed to have problems. So if your needs expand to include H.264, you can upgrade, but I suppose that would render so slow on an 800Mhz iMac that it's not worth it.