Hi, I'm Michael Mistretta, a student passionate about technology, photography, and design. Welcome to my online home where I write about technology, reviews, and my thoughts and opinions on technology-related matters. 
If you are using a Mac for serious video editing, you’ve most likely moved past iMovie to Final Cut. After Apple announced iMovie ‘08, which was geared towards the first-time video editor, the most viable option for any amateur editor was to upgrade to Final Cut Express for only $200. I got FCE for my birthday this year, and it is miles ahead of iMovie. Of course it has a steeper learning curve, but at the same time it has power that iMovie can’t even come close to matching.
Final Cut Express is technically the stripped-down version of it’s big brother, Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Studio at $1300 is designed for the pro editor, and includes Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Color, and Compressor. It is the one-stop suite of video editing applications that are meant for professionals. For the amateur however, all of that is overkill. Final Cut Express has almost all the features of Final Cut Pro, but comes without the rest of the applications in the suite.
Notice how I say “almost”. I’ve been searching all over the Internet for some kind of comparison of what Apple took out of Final Cut Express that is still in Pro. All I’ve found is the lack of support for some high-end video cameras, and lack of batch capturing from tape. However, that doesn’t seem like enough to differentiate the two product lines. Could FCE be Final Cut Pro without the rest of the Studio? If anyone could clear up the differences between FCE and FCP let me know. I’d be interested to see how they stack up feature-wise.
Great article, Ive been wanting to know the differences between the two for quite a while, thanks.
Comment by Dale Humphries — January 21, 2008 @ 1:41 pm
I have to say, I’ve been using FCE for only a little bit and I am SOOOO happy. It’s considerably better than iMovie or Adobe Premiere Elements…Also, note that FCE doesn’t have the switching board as an option, which is really useful in something with a multi-camera setup, which I believe any film should have.
Comment by Connor Bevans — January 21, 2008 @ 6:38 pm
The first step for me is to get a camera, first of all.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a good, mac-compatible one?
Comment by River Jiang — January 21, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
@River What is your price range. If you are looking for a good, small, full-HD camcorder I recommend the Panasonic HDC-SD1 or HDC-SD5
Comment by Michael Mistretta — January 22, 2008 @ 11:41 am
I agree with you. I just did a review of the Apple Final Cut Express 4. I found that Apple continues adding top features to their Mid-level video editing application.
see the review here: http://www.videomaker.com/r/146
Comment by Apple final cut express review — February 27, 2008 @ 5:37 pm
There are fine-tuning tools like certain keyframing and color functions that Express doesn’t have. For a professional, Express would be frustrating, for someone coming from iMovie, it’s a dream.
Comment by Express Review — June 28, 2008 @ 11:43 am
I realize this is coming a little late to the party, but perhaps someone will find the following observations useful:
List of Stuff Final Cut Express Can’t Do:
1) No Cinema Tools. This means no EDLs, no Reverse-Telecine, no advanced 30 fps to 24 fps pulldown. If you don’t know what those things mean, and you never intend to create a print of your project on actual film for a theater projector, you won’t miss these features.
2) No Multicam editing. This means if you shoot with multiple cameras simultaneously, you’ll need to sync the footage manually in the timeline. This would be a drag if your entire project was one big multicam event, like a concert or play. This would kinda be a drag if you were shooting a narrative project that was exclusively multicam, like a sitcom, soap opera, or second unit on an action movie. This would be a little bit of a drag if you used multicam on a few shots in a mostly one-camera movie. This will make absolutely no difference at all if you only have one camera, regardless of how many takes and camera settups you shoot.
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/multicam_editing_martin.html
3) No Batch Capture. If you have one long tape, and you know you only need 5 small chunks of it, and you know the exact timecode in and out of those 5 small chunks, batch capture would let you import only those chunks. In Express, you can import an entire tape, and then delete the parts you don’t need, or manually surf through your tape, and only import what you need manually, or type in one timecode to import from, but you cant put in all 5 in and out timecodes and then hit ‘go’ and make yourself a sandwich.
http://www.squarebox.co.uk/users/rolf/dv/bcfaq.html
4) Timecode. In Express, you can see your live-updating timecode in the timeline window, but you can’t (to my knowledge) burn in the timecode so it shows up in an exported video file.
5) Undo. In Express, you can hit undo up to 32 times; in Pro, you can hit undo up to 99 times.
6) Compatibility with iMovie. Express can import iMovie projects. This feature is not avalable in pro (presumably, apple thinks people using pro would rarely start a project in iMove).
7) No Soundtrack program. FCE 4 does not include Soundtrack like it used to : (
Hope this is helpful to someone out there!
-Dave
Comment by Dave — August 16, 2008 @ 4:07 pm
Wow-Thanks Dave for your insight. That was very, very helpful. I have 1 more question- and forgive me if I don’t ask this correctly- but is the “engine” that processes the video data in Express the same as that used in Studio? I realize that Express will not let me manipulate the video nearly as much, but will the final DVD have the same quality? I shoot a lot of sports and iMovie provides enough degree of control for me, but I’ve never felt like the DVD it produced was as sharp as the video on the mini-DV I fed into it.
Thanks!
Comment by Dan S — August 17, 2008 @ 12:29 am
Dan,
I don’t know for sure, but my gut feeling is the two ‘engines’ are the same. Studio has the program Compressor, which gives you lots more options when converting file formats, including good options for ‘upconverting’ SD to HD. However, the results you get when just outputting to a Quicktime should be basically identical.
In response to your statement “iMovie provides enough degree of control for me, but I’ve never felt like the DVD it produced was as sharp as the video on the mini-DV I fed into it.”
If iMovie is working for you in terms of interface, you’ll be happy to know that it is also capable of producing some really good looking video - very nearly as nice as Final Cut. To ensure you are getting the highest possible output, I’d encourage you to check two things - one in iMovie, one in iDVD:
First, make sure the video that iMove exports is the highest possible quality. I’d encourage you to use the ‘Export Using Quicktime’ menu item to configure your export. If you have the disk space, you might further experiment with changing the video compression from ‘H.264′ to ‘Uncompressed’.
To do this in iMovie 08, go to the ‘Share’ menu, then choose ‘Export Using QuickTime’. In the dialogue box that pops up, export should be set to ‘Movie to QuickTime Movie’. Click the ‘Options…’ button. In the new box, under ‘Video’, click the ‘Settings’ button. Under ‘Compression’ choose ‘none’. Also, ensure the ‘Quality’ slider is all the way to ‘Best’.
Here is some more detailed information on iMovie’s output versus Final Cut’s:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7886584
Second, I’d encourage you to play around with iDVD’s Encoding settings. Many people assume that a DVD meant to be played on a DVD player is basically an exact copy of their video project, but this is not the case. To make a dvd playable on a player, the video must be ‘encoded’, which almost always involves quite a bit of compression.
Here is a very detailed summary of iMovie 08’s somewhat arcane and misleadingly named Encode settings.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080812050651997
Hope you find this helpful!
-Dave
Comment by Dave — August 17, 2008 @ 2:53 pm
Thanks Dave. I have iMovie6/HD, I’m like most others in believing iMovie8 is terrible. I will take your suggestions and tinker around with both iMovie6 and iDVD and see what I can do. Thanks again, you’re the bomb.
Comment by DanS — August 17, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
This is to Dave from the August 17 post. I am looking to use iMovie in a classroom application for a school TV studio where I only have 40 minutes to work with kids of minimal technical knowledge and expertise, but I would like to create video inserts and simple editing to produce relatively professionally looking products.
Is this the best deal and product to accomplish this?
Comment by Michael S. — September 3, 2008 @ 9:51 pm
“Is this the best deal and product to accomplish this?”
Depending on your needs and teaching applications, I think it would be. The results will be fairly professional-looking, in my estimation — certainly nicer than something like Windows Movie Maker.
However, if the purpose of the class is to introduce students to digital non-linear editing, to prepare them for college or professional work in an actual movie studio, you might want to consider Final Cut Express instead. The interface of FCE is much closer to traditional NLE setups like Final Cut Pro and Avid.
My suggestion is to mess around with iMove first, and then move up to FCE if there are things you need that iMove isn’t giving you.
You may find these iLife tutorials useful, if you have no experience with iMovie 08:
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie
Good Luck!
-Dave
Comment by Dave — September 4, 2008 @ 6:33 pm
Micheal, thank you for posing the question.
Dave,
Wow! Thank you for taking the time and putting that list together. I have been playing around creating short videos in Imovie on & off since it came out. Now I have finally upgraded to FCE and was asking the same questions. So glad to hear it is so close to FCP. I also have a FCP Apple Pro Training book. (free) I’m guessing the lessons will be almost the same. Yes?
Steve@316
Comment by Steve Adams — September 9, 2008 @ 10:24 am
sorry for the dupe post, but I realized I had a typo in my web address and email and did not see where I could “edit” my post.
Comment by Steve Adams — September 9, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Hey, im 20 and im also very interested on movies technologie. I always used adobe premier, but now I would like to give a try to FC express or studio… since im not getting the difference between the price… However, I would like to know if FCE can run on a PC cause I got 2 PC… If not I think I will have to check for a second hand mac… Thx for the help, if you have some video that I could look a let me know,
Julien
Comment by Julien Gervais — September 26, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
Julien: Yeah, FCE will only run on a Mac—there is no PC version available, and I doubt there will be. If you live in a major city, mabye check out a local Apple Store, and sit down with one of the “Creative’s” there to take a trial run through FC and see how it compares to Premier.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — September 26, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
This is a comment back to Michael S. Apple has recently offered a (building) site license for FCP 6 for schools. I think the price is 5,000. This is an excellent deal if you are going to put it on many workstations in a school building (training lab, student labs, etc.).
Comment by Chris I. — October 5, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
I’m late to this very useful thread, but I just discovered it. So this is a follow-up question for Dave, who gave such a fabulous rundown of the limitations of FCE. I hope he’s still reading…
I’m looking into buying the Nikon D90, which is the DSLR that takes 24fps video at 720p resolution. (AVI format) It also has a strange stair-step artifact that has been much discussed on the dvxuser forum. Apparently there’s a very elaborate fix for that which involves slicing the footage into 9-pixel high segments with a mask and then shading the top and bottom pixels. (I only vaguely understand this myself at this point. But apparently it can be done with Final Cut Pro.)
So the questions are these:
Can Final Cut Express handle 24fps video at 720 resolution? (I read somewhere that it couldn’t handle 24p, but that may have been an earlier version.)
Is there any masking functionality in Final Cut Express?
Many many thanks.
Trevor
Comment by Trevor C. — October 15, 2008 @ 7:36 pm
I can help you with the first part of your question: Yes, Final Cut Express works with both 720p and 24p video. I know for a fact that it works very well with the D90 (something I’ve written about frequently).
As for the masking, I can’t help you there. I don’t completely understand what you are trying to do.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — October 15, 2008 @ 7:39 pm
Hello, I’m new to Mac, and just bought a new mbp which will be delivered tomorrow. I switched my system to mac, since I have a video editing works to do, and I was looking for a software that I can rely on. I plan to buy a FCE 4, but I’m still curious about what people say about it can’t handle a soundtrack program, the one that is missing from FC HD. What does it mean? Can anyone please explain it to me? I really appreciate your attention. Thanks
Regards,
AL
Comment by Aldo Lammy — October 28, 2008 @ 6:22 am
Aldo -
Final Cut Express 4 no longer comes with a soundtrack application, aka “Soundtrack”. Instead, Apple has offered Final Cut users Garageband integration. Garageband is free, multi-track audio editing software that comes with every Mac—including your new MBP.
FCE4 IS able to support soundtrack software. It just doesn’t come with a dedicated app. Garageband works fine for most basic and novice features.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — October 28, 2008 @ 8:28 am