Customer Reviews

Apple Final Cut Express HD (Mac) [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had used iMovie for several projects over the last year and a half before I decided to upgrade to Final Cut Express HD when working on video of my wife's niece's wedding. I finished that project, but for me iMovie's ease and elegance is more important than FCE HD's power and complexity, so I have sold my copy of FCE HD on eBay and have gone back to iMovie.

The rest of this review is from my original review of FCE HD from July 11, 2005 (shortly after I bought it). This revision was submitted on February 13, 2006.

Apple sells FCE HD as an a step up in features from iMovie, but -- wow! -- it gives you a lot more flexibility but at a huge cost in complexity too! The Apple magic of making something simple enough to let you concentrate on the creativity and not the mechanics of the project seems missing here.

IMPORTANT: An employee at the Apple Store near me confided to me that there is very little difference between Final Cut Pro HD and Final Cut Express HD. The extra $700 for the Pro version allows outputting your movie in broadcast quality -- if you don't need that, he said, you can save $700 and buy the Express version. I had just seen the employee give a short in-store class on Final Cut Pro and he said I could do EVERYTHING he did in the class EXACTLY the same way in Final Cut Express! He said the only way you could tell which is which is by the name in the menu bar! (Maybe this is common knowledge in the Final Cut Pro/Express community, but I couldn't find out exactly what was different on Apple's website.)

IMPORTANT: There is NO TUTORIAL included for Final Cut Express. There is a 900 page PDF manual on the CD, but since I had never worked with "pro" video editing software, I found it very useful to buy a third party how-to book. I chose "Final Cut Express" by Lisa Brenneis (ISBN: 0-321-35026-X, Peachpit Press) because it seemed well written and had many useful examples. There are a few scattered examples in the online manual, but not enough for my taste. The online manual is all the help you get -- selecting Window -> Help just brings up the manual; no Help Viewer help here.

Final Cut Express HD is awesome. But don't try to learn how to use FCE on your own - buy a book such as Final Cut Express for Dummies and spend some time working through the concepts. I had previously used Adobe Premiere, so making the switch to FCE was not quite the hurdle that is going to be for others. If you make the jump from iMovie, do realize you will need to spend a lot of time learning how to use FCE.

If you are going to edit simple home movies, probably stick with iMovie. iMovie is quick and simple. But for professional results, definitely use FCE. But do realize there is a fairly steep learning curve. Once mastered, editing in FCE is quick.

I use FCE for professional quality editing work when I need to edit down multiple cameras shooting simultaneously (a feature that Final Cut Pro now makes automatic, but not FCE), and complex editing involving numerous audio and video tracks. I routinely re-arrange my audio from one clip and overlay over another. I also routinely adjust audio levels and mix multiple audio tracks. While FCE HD comes with the Soundtrack application, most of my audio editing is done with the FCE audio tools directly. LiveType is a titling application that also is bundled with FCE HD and enables the creation of broadcast quality titling and titling effects. LiveType is worth the price of FCE HD alone! FCE also includes a huge assortment of both audio and video filters to adjust or clean up original content, or color filters to match the colors between multiple cameras.

Except for simple home movies, where I still sometimes use iMovie, I use FCE HD for everything else. I could not produce the type of material that I create without FCE HD. I strongly recommend FCE for anyone wishing to produce professional quality video results, especially those who need to synchronize and mix multiple video and audio tracks and/or use advanced titling features of LiveType.

Like most video applications, more RAM is better. FCE sort of runs on my 640 MB RAM Powerbook G4. But it flies on the my dual 867 Mhz G4 with 2 GB of RAM (but 1 GB would be plenty). If you are going to be doing video editing, a GB of RAM will be very desirable.

I had read a lot of reviews (here and elsewhere) warning of Final Cut's massive learning curve, and I do believe that helped soften the blow when I first tried this program. Because there definitely is a learning curve--this is far more complex than iMovie. But, the good news is, it's not beyond the newbie's reach!

I'm such a newbie with anything video, it's pitiful. I have only made two or three small movies in iMovie, and they weren't very sophisticated. I mostly just tinkered around. But, being the fool that I am, I decided that I wanted to get Final Cut Express to go along with the new camcorder I had just purchased.

Because I was prepared to have to re-learn (or struggle) at first with Final Cut, I had purchased a book (for version 2 of FCE, which was perfectly suitable). Armed with my book and limited expectations, I set about trying to make a fun little "music video" (using video clips and still pictures). Amazingly enough, I learned how to do the "Ken Burns Effect" with the pictures, make transitions from one clip to the next, edit the sound so that one track would predominate for part of the video, then fade out for other parts. And I was able to fix the video clips (zoom in, lighten, change aspect ratio). And then I added titles with LiveText. All this in the first two days of using Final Cut! Sure, the little video I made was no award-winner, but it was actually a servicable, fun little project that I wasn't too ashamed to show my friends.

(Another thing about fixing the aspect ratio of one of the video clips--there was this one clip that seemed resistent to any tweaking or adjusting that I tried with it. I had used multiple programs to try to resize it to the correct dimensions, but something always went wrong. Either the picture quality degraded terribly, or else the corrected dimensions didn't "stick" and it bounced back to being distorted. Nothing worked--until Final Cut. I'm sure that other programs could have done the same thing, but I tried so many, and failed. So that was another thing that impressed me!)

I know there's a whole lot more to learn about Final Cut, and I certainly don't anticipate that I'll become a master at it. But it does offer *a lot* more flexibility than iMovie, and it is definitely a lot of fun.

The right way to approach it is, I believe, to start small, expect baby steps at first, have fun, and GET A BOOK! A book is absolutely essential. If you are an impatient soul who expects perfection the first day, this is not the application for you. Because you learn to "do it manually," you have much more control--but it takes time to learn it all.

Oh, a note about hardware: I made my first little video on a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini with 512 megs of RAM. It wasn't a speed demon by any means, but because my video was short (about 2 minutes), it really wasn't too painfully slow most of the time (except for rendering, but I guess that was going to be slow anyway). I have since upgraded the Mini to 1 GB of RAM, and *everything* is snappier, so I highly recommend it. But it's good to know that even a little Mac Mini with less-than-impressive RAM can work in FCE.

If you've only worked with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, you may be intimidated at first, but the end results speak for themselves. It is true that Final Cut Express HD isn't necessarily intuitive and the options are innumerable, but you will emerge from the other side of the learning curve amazed at how polished your works have become.

You can update old iMovie projects easily; just import them into Express HD and add high quality titles and credits and an attractive soundtrack. If you want to take it further, you can experiment with an astounding variety of professional quality transitions, filters, and effects to deliver the full visual and auditory impact you desire.

If you already have a previous release of Final Cut Express, the inclusion of LiveType and Soundtrack alone justify this upgrade. For a bonus, GarageBand musicians will love the hundreds of Apple loops included in the Soundtrack package.

Years ago had the chance to try FCPro. Having Experienced the greatness of Media 100, I was not impressed. Cheap NLEs don't offer much flexibility so when I saw how inexpensively I could have my own copy of FCE and after reading other's praises, I gave it a try. It's very close to being a poor man's FCP. The learning curve is fairly steep but the capabilities are worth the study. I'm very happy with everything about my purchase.

This version is deficient of many important abilities that decent video would need in the same way as FC 2 suite is packed with some programs and utilities majority of video don't need at all. Unfortunately there's no normality, no firm middle ground. I think Apple has to determine who is dedicated audience for the product.

i am a beginning film student at a school in santa monica, ca. let me tell you, as one as computer ILLITERATE as i am, final cut pro was so easy to learn. i was amazed at all the stuff it has--color correcting, sound/audio level adusting, effects, etc. i am now gioing intio my 3rd quarter and am looking forward to working with this again. i would not use any other post production software.

This is a great program for your mac... I've used it in a film class the previous year and it took me a year to really get the hang of it. Because it has no tutorial I recomend you find someone who has used this and get them to give you a few lessons.

I've actually downgraded from Final Cut HD because when I bought that software it didn't work with my computer and then Apple couldn't fix so I was out $300. I needed to buy another software package but didn't want to spend another $300 so I went with FC Express. Because I'm a student it only cost me $99. To tell you the truth it's not that much different than the full version of FC. Most people that use FC are doing features which I'm not doing, and other people use it for the title generator and sound editing. I have other softwares for that.
If you are looking into upgrading from iMovie and want FC go with FC Express. It's cheaper and there is not much difference in the two. If you are taking a video course at a college or other schools, check out the student discount price, it's great.

Isn't this a Mac product? I thought Mac products were supposed to be (A) stable, and (B) easy to use. This product is stable, (once I upped my RAM to 2GB) but at 512MB it brought the system to a crawl.

But as far as ease of use--I'm not a dumb guy (although my kids may argue the point) but this product is really a victum of itself. It is too hard for the "Express" audience and is really intended (in my opinion) ONLY for profression Final Cut Pro users. In other words, if you use Final Cut Pro at work, and want something on your home-Mac, the Express version is a great value. You already know it and people have paid you to get used to it.

But if you're a iMovie user, Pinnacle Systems Studio user, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 user, this product seems like I'm trying to fly the Space Shuttle.

How do you output WMV with this product? You can do it in any of the PC-based products, oh, and they also output Quicktime so why does Apple have a hangup about WMV?

I recently asked in an Apple forum "How do you do Picture in picutre?" I got a great response from an experienced user. "It only took a couple of minutes, just do these 6 steps..." Great, in Premiere Elements or Pinnacle, I click on the PIP icon and its done. I didn't have to do 6 obscure steps.

The product is also one of those old fashion "Million Windows all over the place" applications. You try to minimize the thing by pressing one of the tiny little minimize buttons (like all Mac apps have) and it closes only that window of the app, like the preview window, not the timeline, not the browser.

Bottom line... if you already use, know and love Final Cut Pro, this is a low-cost way to get a similar product on your own PC (although the Academic version of the Pro version is pretty affordable too).

I don't see the point of this product unless its just to provide a low-cost entry into Final Cut Pro for people who use Pro for a living.