Q: final cut studio

You need to be more specific with that question. I mean, if you have the Final Cut Studio disks, and a computer running Mac OS 10.8 or earlier, it's easy. It get's tricky once you try to install on 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11. Because FCP 7 was discontinued 5 years ago, and the OS that supported it was 10.6.8. Every new OS goes further away from supporting that software, and I believe that the installer for it stops working after 10.8, because the installer needed something called ROSETTA to work, and Rosetta wasn't included in 10.9...might not have in 10.8.  So there are workarounds to get it to work.

I can confirm that you can install it on 10.8, at least with 10.8.5 because I just did it several weeks ago.

Shane Ross wrote:

 

... and I believe that the installer for it stops working after 10.8, because the installer needed something called ROSETTA to work, and Rosetta wasn't included in 10.9...might not have in 10.8.

Since, as you know, Rosetta is NOT required to install Final Cut Pro 6 (Final Cut Studio 2), there is little doubt that Rosetta is needed to install its successor.

No, you don't NEED it. But that's how the normal install processed worked. If you clicked INSTALL, The MacOS handed it over to Rosetta, or Rosetta was part of the process.  WITHOUT Rosetta, you need to do workarounds to get it to install. Those are NOT the normal install process. I was talking about the way the normal way worked.

I will bet you dollars to doughnuts, that if you attempt to install FCP7 in a Snow Leopard partition that does not have the optional Rosetta installed, it will install just fine!  That is because the installers for FCP7 and FCP6 do not include any PPC code.  Note Sunnys-mommy's post above about installing FCP7 in 10.8.

You are giving misleading advice by mentioning Rosetta in the context of installing FCP7 on any version of OS X. Rosetta's only function is to translate PPC code on an Intel Mac.

I was surprised too and thought it wouldn't work.  But since there is some controversy about whether or not you could install in on an Intel machine, I thought what the **** - I'll give a whirl.  I had deleted the original install which had been brought over to my Mountain Lion machine through migration assistant because of issues with DVDSP.  And lo & behold, it installed and so far, knocking on wood, I haven't had issues with it.

Yes, years ago, Jeremy Johnstone debunked the long held notion that it was PowerPC code that was preventing FCP6 from being installed in a post-Snow Leopard world; at that time Lion.  He discovered that it was code inserted by Apple deep into the bowels of OS X Lion and thereafter that prevented the installation of FCP6 and certain other older Apple software products.  HawaiianHippie then discovered the simple workaround to simply delete this file from the System Folder and install FCP6 and then reinstall this file just in case.

Being drawn for many years to the issue of helping people work with PowerPC applications in a post-Snow Leopard (Rosetta-less) world, I noticed the research on FCP6, borrowed a copy and have now successfully installed it in Snow Leopard, Yosemite and El Capitan.  El Capitan requires turning off at least one, if not both of two of its "security" features for the successful installation of FCP6: Gatekeeper and SIP:

                                                            [click on image to enlarge]

I have no experience with Final Cut Pro 7, but again it is inconceivable that having produced a version of Final Cut Pro, version 6, that installs and works on Intel Macs without PowerPC code, that it would hobble its successor, Final Cut Pro 7, with PowerPC code that requires Rosetta to run.