Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Going back to iMovie!, July 11, 2005
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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Can't live without Final Cut Express HD, January 16, 2006
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TOTALLY loving it (but am prepared for learning curve)., April 18, 2006
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.
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