I am running Final Cut Pro 7 on Snow Leopard, and was thinking about moving to OS X Lion. I don’t want to move to Final Cut Pro X, but am concerned about Final Cut Pro 7 compatibility in Lion. I fear that I will eventually have to upgrade due to iOS device–syncing requirements. What should I do?

While we haven’t heard of any compatibility issues with Final Cut Pro 7 running in OS X Lion, it doesn’t mean that you won’t run into any problems after the upgrade. Because we haven’t seen a Pro Applications Update in a while, and because Apple is no longer selling FCP7, we believe that Apple is trying to swing users over to Final Cut Pro X for future support.

Final Cut Pro X is the only version currently being offered by Apple: $299.99 in the Mac App Store.

Since you only have one system and rely on Final Cut Pro 7, we would recommend keeping your system the way it is, unless you just can’t live without iCloud or any of the other features in Lion.

And now that Final Cut Pro X has been updated a few times (see our review of Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3), it might suit your needs. You can even migrate your old Final Cut Pro 7 projects over to it with an app called 7toX.

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