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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.

Update: Dave sends his remarks:

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 : (

Color. Final cut Express has a color correction module that works pretty well. Final Cut Studio comes with the program Color, which is extremely powerful, allowing real-time previews in any resolution, and an 8 stage workflow that allows you to affect the entire image first, then multiple areas of a single shot independently, along with many other high-end features. If you occasionally want to correct an over- or under-exposed shot, or your shots sometimes look too blue, green or pink, Express should do the job. Also, learning how to use Color is very time-consuming and complicated – it is not a program like Photoshop or Final Cut itself, where you can just teach yourself by fiddling around a bit.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there!

-Dave

Update #2: Dave responds with more useful information:

Robin,

You asked, “what’s DVD pro like compared to iDVD? ” In my experience, DVD Studio Pro and iDVD are pretty different programs. iDVD is great for the casual user who wants to make a great-looking dvd simply and quickly, and doesn’t care about customized menus. The templates in iDVD look great, and making a professional-looking menu can be done in minutes, if not seconds. Professional users will find some secondary uses for it as well; when I was in school, we used iDVD all the time to quickly burn copies of unfinished projects for screening.

DVD Stuido Pro is a much more robust program, designed for someone who needs or wants the DVD itself (menus, buttons, etc.) to be custom-made. While iDVD offers almost no options for customization, DVD Studio Pro gives you a blank canvas, allowing you to import images and motion content to create menus to your exact specifications. There is some learning curve, and some of the interface decisions really leave you scratching your head sometimes, but if you are willing to roll with that, you can learn to love it, and get some great-looking original results.

(One last thing to note: DVD Studio Pro is not designed for you to create the backgrounds, buttons, motion menus, etc.; it’s function is to assemble those pieces into a finished DVD. To get the most out of it — to get anything at all out of it — you need to have access to Photoshop, or at least GIMP or similar. If you want motion menus, you need to use another program to make them — luckily, motion and FCP work great for this!)

You asked, “are the other applications really something to consider in the bundle FCS? are they even that good?”

Okay, so the other applications are: Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3 along with the 3 supplementary apps LiveType 2, Cinema Tools 3, amd Qmaster 2. What do all those things do? Here is what wikipedia has to say:

* Motion 3 – “real-time motion graphics design”
* Soundtrack Pro 2 – “advanced audio editing and sound design”
* Color – a new color grading application adapted from Silicon Color’s FinalTouch.
* Compressor 3 – a video encoding tool for outputting projects in different formats.
* LiveType 2 – a text animation program.
* Cinema Tools 3 – tools specific to film processing.
* Qmaster 2 – a distributed processing tool.

Motion 3 is, in my opinion, a good program for doing exactly what it aims to do; it is not the end-all be-all of graphics effects, and doesn’t try to be, but it is pretty useful for the filmmaker who is doing basic stuff in-house. By ‘basic stuff’, I mean: taking existing images or objects, and moving them around a screen — either by traditional keyframing (you tell it to start here on this frame, end there on that frame, and the computer fills in the middle frames), or by their so-called ‘behaviors’ (pre-programed movements which, when stacked together, look pretty good with almost no effort). For making animated text and objects, I find Motion pretty powerful and efficient, though not nearly as versatile as, say, Adobe After Effects.

Soundtrack Pro is also really solid, and getting better every day. I like it a lot, and though it isn’t yet as powerful or widely accepted as, say, Pro Tools, I think it is definitely robust enough to mix a big feature film without trouble. My favorate thing about it is how well it integrates with Final Cut.

Traditionally, when you edit a movie, you edit the picture and ignore the sound, then when the picture is as good as you can make it, you ‘lock picture’ and go to work on the audio. Often, while spending days and days tweaking the audio without much thought of the picture, you start to notice little things you wished you had done, but didn’t notice before; often it’s just little things – a frame or two here and there – but they start to drive you crazy. But you know that to un-lock’ the picture and fix those things will cause everything after that point in Pro Tools or Nuendo or whatever to be out-of-sync, which could potentially be a big hassle to fix.

Soundtrack has a special interface to correct this, so if you unlock picture and make 35 small edits in Final Cut, it can read the .fcp files, see where you’ve made changes, and (this is brilliant) ask you how you want it to fix each one. For some people, this is a little thing, but for me and some of my friends, it fundamentally alters our post workflow in such a positive and organic way, it is worth it if there are some little features missing relative to Pro Tools. (Bring this up with an audio engineer, though, and you might get a totally different answer!)

I’ve already mentioned Color above, but let me just say: it is amazing. The learning curve on the program is very steep, but figuring this program out rewards you in a huge way. Back before Color was Color, it was this buggy crazy weird program called Final Touch HD. It took forever to save, crashed *all* the time, and and all of my friends were in awe of it. Finally, we could do real color correction without spending $350/hr (student rate) for DI processing! Color is basically that same program, but much, much more stable, and with a few useful new features. It isn’t the best color correction software out there — Da Vinci Resolve is definately more powerful — but it is the only package I’ve seen for under $500,000. (That’s not a typo. Half a million dollars.) So, at roughly, what, 1/000 the price of the competition, you are doing pretty good with Color.

The other four programs: Compressor is great at what it does – put things or batches of things in other formats. If you need that, it works perfectly. One neat thing, if I remember right, is how it can output audio files in multiple formats (2.0, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 etc.) and integrate them with DVD Studio Pro.

LiveType is a piece of crap, endlessly frustrating, mostly because every time you change anything in a project, the entire thing needs to re-render. Luckilly, it is just a very wattered-down version of Motion (which is so much faster and nicer), so you’ll never have to use it.

For the home user, Cinema Tools and Qmaster are probably never going to be opened. The only time I’ve ever used Cinema Tools was once, when I got some processed dailies sent to me incorrectly, and I need to do a 24:30fps conversion in-house. It worked great! I feel like nowadays, if you are shooting in film, and you are going to go out to film with an EDL, you are probably going to have some kind of Digital Intermediate, so the post house can handle the film stuff for you. But maybe that’s just me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you are never going to shoot film on a film camera (ie not digital), and you probably wont make a film print of your movie (but even if you do…) you will never ever use this program, ever.

Similarly Qmaster, made for distributing processes over a network, is probably outside the scope of most users here; in my experience, anyone who is making movies outside the studio system would rather spend $10,000 on lights, costumes, equipment rentals, or lunch and craft services for your crew, than buying extra machines so you can cut down your render time. Anyone who is thinking of distributing processes over a network is definately not reading this trying to decide weather or not they should buy FC Express — they are way past that — so it is kind of a non-issue.

Hopefully that answers your questions, or someone finds this useful.

Best,
Dave