Safe upgrade for 2008 MacPro QuadCore Intel Xeon on 10.6.8

[rickself]

Now that Apple is telling me to upgrade my home MacPro QuadCore Intel Xeon to El Capitan, I'm wondering which one I can safely upgrade to. I'm not ready to go to El Capitan. But what am I read for? Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks?
I'm running mostly CS5 and Final Cut Pro 7.
Good?
Bad?
Ugly?
Thoughts?

[Joe]

I'm not sure if you can still get the free upgrade for versions earlier than El Capitan unless you already have it stashed or you know someone that has a copy. Doing a quick look in the app store I'm not seeing any downloadable versions of anything other than El Capitan. Also I don't think it was a free upgrade until Mavericks was released so that would rule out Lion and Mountain Lion.

[rickself]

Hey Joe - We are both up way too late!
I have access from a couple of sources of previous upgrades. If I eventually end up with El Capitan that's okay too, but I'd like to progress up the steps to make sure the software I use, Final Cut Pro in particular, work with the OS. Apple really tanked FCP from version 7 to version 8 and I do a good deal of short videos as a side to my prepress. I took me forever to get back to FCP 7 after upgrading to FCP 10 with OS 10.6.8.
So I'm not concerned with the free upgrade from Apple, just the goods and bads of Snow Leopard through Yosemite.

[andyfest]

A few months ago we upgraded from 10.6.8 SL to 10.8.5 ML. We felt more comfortable with ML 'cause we colour-code or label a lot of folders and hot folders, a feature that gets reduced to "tags" or coloured dots from Mavericks up. You can get the labelling feature back somewhat with 3rd party Finder add-ons. If you are upgrading from SL, make sure that you don't need or utilize any Rosetta-based apps as you will lose the ability to use them from 10.7 (Lion) up. Also, if you are looking at Mavericks or higher, you will lose any connectivity with older Windows-based servers (W2000 for sure + W2003 too I think). Even with ML, I had a hell of a time connecting to our ancient W2000 platesetter server. One of these days I know we will have to upgrade to 10.10 or above to update our CC2014 apps to 2015 or beyond, but I'm not looking forward to it. One thing I have noticed is that the majority of our clients, including our largest client, have still not upgraded beyond CS6 apps, and have no plans to do so. I can honestly say that I have only encountered a couple of dozen CC-based files in the past year, so right now I am not especially motivated to do another OS upgrade.

[Possum]

Thanks for the info about the servers, Andyfest. My boss made some noises about upgrading to CC maybe a year ago, but I'd have to upgrade the OS on my end, which would mean a new laser printer, and perhaps more stuff. I didn't even think about the server at the time. It's so cranky, I'm sure it's old.

[rickself]

Thanks, andyfest. This is just my home Mac so I'm not concerned with networking. I don't THINK  I have any programs that use Rosetta - in fact I don't even know/think I have it unless it's part of 10.6.8.

[rickself]

Now I understand about Rosetta - wikipedia does come in handy at times! It made Power PC applications work on Intel machines - in theory anyways.
If I am reading correctly, having an Intel Xeon in my MacPro, the processing speed will also increase with the upgrade from 10.6.8 to, say - 10.8.5. 

[Joe]

The only way you would see any processing speed improvement would be to make sure you are running 64-bit applications which I doubt that Final Cut Pro 7 is.

The time has come for Final Cut Pro 7 editors to begin thinking about the upgrade process because Apple's new hardware comes pre-installed with Mountain Lion OS X 10.8.2, and is not backwards compatible – meaning you cannot install an older version of MAC OS X on your new machine, and in turn Final Cut Pro 7 is not supported on MAC OS X Mountain Lion.

We have heard from a number of industry veterans who have had success in running Final Cut Pro 7 on the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.  However, MelroseMAC recommends that you move forward cautiously.  Please keep in mind the following: 
Final Cut Pro 7 is an End Of Life product

Another user on using it with Mavericks:

FCP was abandoned by Apple years ago, and so you are really on your own if you do the upgrade and have problems. There appears to be no consensus opinion -  there are reports it works, doesn't work, or in my case when I loaded FCP7 on a non-mission critical Mac running Mavericks, it was working but was quirky and felt borderline unstable.

[rickself]

The difference between Final Cut Pro 7 and Final Cut Pro 8 is the difference between Freehand 4 and Illustrator CS, PageMaker and InDesign. They threw out the book and started over and the learning curve is so radical, that's what took me 6 months to narrow down what version worked with the 10.6 architecture. FCP 7 is the only version before the change.

Thanks for the FCP quotes, joe.

[andyfest]

Thanks for the info about the servers, Andyfest. My boss made some noises about upgrading to CC maybe a year ago, but I'd have to upgrade the OS on my end, which would mean a new laser printer, and perhaps more stuff. I didn't even think about the server at the time. It's so cranky, I'm sure it's old.

We made the upgrade to OSX 10.8.5 ML because we needed to be able to use the CC2014 apps the odd time and you need to be running at least OSX 10.7 Lion to be able to do that. CC2015 apps require at least OSX 10.9 Mavericks as an OS, so as of now we have not made that jump. You can connect OSX 10.8 ML to a Windows 2000 server, but you have to check a couple of things:
1. Ensure that the W2000 server's Date & Time matches that of your Mac
2. Connect using your normal Command K, then enter cifs://username:password@ip address of server. Note that I didn't use afp or smb to lead into the connection. That worked for me.

[rickself]

The only way you would see any processing speed improvement would be to make sure you are running 64-bit applications which I doubt that Final Cut Pro 7 is.

Ya, looks like FCP 7 is 32 bit.
BUT will I see improvement in Illustrator and Photoshop?

[Joe]

Photoshop for sure. I would guess Illustrator too but I'm not sure. I know Acrobat DC is faster than XI.