[Simon Young]

Thanks for the reply! I’ve no trouble downloading the updates – they are still available on Apple’s site, and I even linked to them in my original post. My question was rather which ones I need, whether my list is comprehensive, and what order to install them in.

As for the reason to return to Leopard… well, I’ve actually been running 10.5.8 quite happily since I got my MacBook Pro three years ago, but I had to use a fancy plug-in for a client and it required Snow Leopard so I upgraded my system (from scratch, I might add) and hadn’t the time to clone my system first. I soon found a few quirks in Snow Leopard which annoyed me:

1) The Finder was sluggish in column view, which is the only view I use. Before you suggest that my system is at fault, this was on a totally clean install. I’ve always found SL that way when flicking through folders.

2) Screen Capture is less reliable, and I use it all the time to get great stills from HD video in Final Cut Pro. Sometimes it’ll capture a blank screen, even when there’s video on the screen, and other times it’ll capture the wrong frame. Weird, and not something I can live with.

3) I could never figure out monitor calibration. Setting Gamma 2.2 gave me slightly darker results than Gamma 2.2 under Leopard, and I have no idea why. Looking at the profile, my calibration seemed to be closer to Gamma 2.4. Again, this from a fresh install on a three year-old MacBook Pro. Weird.

Nothing else wrong with Snow Leopard really, and I’m sure FCS3 works great on it. In fact I’ve created a separate partition just for Leopard this time, so I can stay content in my old ways forever whilst getting the benefits of SL, namely Compressor 4 and FCP X when the time comes.