FCE won't open on my new MacBook Pro - says I need a Quartz Extreme Card

Question

I just bought a new MacBook Pro Laptop, and since I was having lots of hardware and software related problems with my old one, I clean installed everything rather than transferring things through archive.
Anyhow, I was initially able to register and install FCE from the original disk and then downloaded and installed all available upgrades. I opened it up, tried "Log and Transfer" to upload some video I'd shot on my Canon Vixia HFS10, and it worked fine. I saved and closed, but now, next morning when I tried to open FCE to edit my video it wouldn't open. A "Minimum System Check" came up that said "This system does not meet the following minimum requirements: Final Cut Express requires that your system have a Quartz Extreme Capable Video Card." I'm pretty sure that my NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT cards meet the requirements and that Final Cut Express just doesn't recognize that they are much better than the minimum requirements it is programmed to look for. How can I fix this? I saw another thread on a similar topic suggesting that someone delete their FCE, and then perform a clean install, but that's effectively what I've just gone through, and I'm not in the mood to spend a couple of hours seeing if the same thing I just did fixes the problem I have now. This seems like something that would be an easy programming fix, probably a simple modification to a preferences file, but I wonder if anyone out there has the solution?
Message was edited by: nate.andersen

Answer 1

No, I have FCE 4 - should have said that - and it worked on my older Intel based MacBook Pro.
As it turns out, though, I think I've solved the problem, adapting a solution to a related problem I found on MacRumors.com. Don't know why this is necessary, but here's the solution I tried:
1. right click on the FCE application icon and select "Show Package Contents"
2. open the "Contents" folder and then open the "info.plist" folder in Text Edit
3. find the line that says: "<key>AELMinimumQuartzExtremeCapable</key>," and replace it with "<key>AELMinimumGeForceCapable</key>", and then make sure that the next line says "<string></string>" without any number specified. Or, if you have some other kind of graphics card that you know is compatible, you could say what that is instead of GeForce. I found it doesn't work just to delete this line completely.
Again, I don't know why Apple didn't build in this flexibility when they updated their standard Graphics cards, but in any case this solution seems to work.