I have a friend running FCP7 on a pimped out 2.4GHz 15" MBP (pre-unibody) NVIDEA 8600 512mb (I think) and is wanting to do HD video, but compression is SO SLOWWWW. She's considering a 13" 2.7GHz i7 model. I know that the compression should be a good deal faster, but I see that Intel3000 graphics is the ONLY non-video card machine that is deemed compatible with FCP7.

Anyone with experience using FCP7 with intel3000 graphics? Comments?

I'll be interested to see what people say to this. It's my understanding that FCP 7 doesn't really benefit from the use of any particular graphics card. It looks like maxing the ram is the biggest help. FCP X uses the graphics card from what I can tell, but I'm not sure I understand exactly how. My son likes Premier and AfterEffects, and is going to get more ram (he only has 4gigs) and then look into a CUDA capable video card after that. It sounds like for speed, the CUDA thing is huge, but I don't think it has any relevance to the Mac at this point (FCP doesn't do CUDA, and Apple doesn't use the right graphics cards). Anyway, I obviously don't know much, so sorry about my mess ;-) kj.

yeah, FCP 7 should be fine on intel 3000, because as kj notes, 7 is not GPU dependent. CPU, RAM and disk speed will be bigger factors in determining FCP 7 performance. But, as kj also notes, in FCP X, GPU becomes much more important, as FCP uses GPU to accelerate a bunch of things (background rendering, GPU-accelerated export, etc). Intel 3000 is the minimum for FCP X GPU - [www.apple.com]

thanks all - twas helpful