Need Hardware Upgrades for Final Cut Pro 5

My Internet Connection was down all day yesterday and half of Friday, and so I took the time to burn the rest of the interviews to CDs to ship out.

I also upgraded my Macintosh OS from 10.1.2 to 10.4. I've been dreading this upgrade since there are always things that are thrown out of whack.

Mozilla displaced my mail folder and all of my e-mail messages had temporarily disappeared. Luckily I was able to fix that this morning.

But I've run into bigger troubles with Final Cut Pro that I can't get around without upgrading my video card and the amount of RAM that I have.

After I upgraded to Tiger, Final Cut Pro 3.0 refused to run giving me the message:

Final Cut Pro requires a System ID file which is either missing or invalid.

Please reinstall using the original CD that was used to install Final Cut Pro.

Instead of reinstalling FCP 3.0, I tried upgrading to FCP 5. I had purchased the latest Final Cut Studio package at the same time that Tiger was released -- It included FCP 5 as well as DVD Studio Pro 4.0, Motion 2.0 and Soundtrack Pro.

I knew I wouldn't have enough hardware resources to run Motion -- which requires a ton of RAM and a faster processor than I have.

But it turns out that I need more RAM to even run FCP 5. I got an error message with a big red stop sign and exclamation mark saying:

Configuration error
This software requires certain hardware or software which is missing
* 512MB of RAM.

I also received the following error:

The installed graphics card is not compatible with Final Cut Pro, which requires a Quartz Extreme-capable AGP graphics card. For more information on minimum system requirements, see the "Before You Install Final Cut Pro" document or go to the application website.

I was hoping to play around with the FCP XML export features, but I'll have to wait until I upgrade these things in order to get back online with FCP 5.