For those of you who have upgraded to FCP 4....What do you think? Is it worth the $399 to you personally? More importantly, what new features will you make use of? Thanks for your input!
For those of you who have upgraded to FCP 4....What do you think? Is it worth the $399 to you personally? More importantly, what new features will you make use of? Thanks for your input!
One of my friend, who use FCP 3 on a regular basis (even it's just for fun) told me to buy FCE and not FC4. He even think that he is going to buy FCE, because he find that the various upgrade of FC cost many bucks. FC3 do not work with the lattest version of quicktime, he is oblige to upgrade.
FCE is a good deal, and it require time to use it at 100 %.
FC4 has two main advantages : the ability to use a compressed format, to make your project, and when it's ok to convert it in a full format. If you own a small computer like a powerbook pismo it's perfect. FC4 is not limited to DV, at the contrary of FCE.
My advice, buy FC4 if you are not happy with FCE. But if you are happy with FCE, stay with it, the next upgrade of FCE will cost less money and will give you also new features.
I bought FCP 3(academic version) when Apple announced it back in those days.... I am not a expert or a pro for video editing, just step-by-step and learn type. Meanwhile, are you sure that FCP 3 doesn't work well with QT 6.x Pro? Although I use it for fun/light duty.. should I run out any upgrade to version 4 or get a copy of Final Cut Express(Hint: grab a copy of Adobe Premiere from ebay first)
One of my friend, who use FCP 3 on a regular basis (even it's just for fun) told me to buy FCE and not FC4. He even think that he is going to buy FCE, because he find that the various upgrade of FC cost many bucks. FC3 do not work with the lattest version of quicktime, he is oblige to upgrade. FCE is a good deal, and it require time to use it at 100 %.
Final Cut Express is indeed a good deal for what it does, but it lacks several things besides the ability to edit non-DV material. I've used Final Cut Express, and the things that bothered me most were the lack of good logging capabilities and the lack of keyframing. QuickView and the scopes also are missing in action. (If you don't know what these things are, you probably don't need Final Cut Pro's extra features. )
As for Final Cut Pro 4: I've used it briefly. Whether you should upgrade depends largely on what you do with it. I think the big news with Final Cut Pro 4 is the extra applications you get with it. Soundtrack, LiveType, Compressor and Cinema Tools are all excellent apps that might largely justify the upgrade cost. If I'm not mistaken, Compressor uses the same distributed computing engine as Shake, so it can use any available processing power on the network to speed things up. I with Final Cut Pro's renderer had this too.
RTExtreme works as advertised; there are now more effects available in realtime, as long as you have a fast machine. You still need to render when you're done previewing, though, and that doesn't seem to be faster than before.
So I guess I'd recommand upgrading, especially if you're going to use any of the scoring-, titling- or compression-related features that are enabled by Final Cut Pro 4's new satellite apps.
I was able to import video from an 8MM camcorder using a dazzle converter. One of the things I couldn't do though was log what I was importing. But other than that, it imported pretty well.
Comments
Originally posted by Slackula
For those of you who have upgraded to FCP 4....What do you think? Is it worth the $399 to you personally? More importantly, what new features will you make use of? Thanks for your input!
One of my friend, who use FCP 3 on a regular basis (even it's just for fun) told me to buy FCE and not FC4. He even think that he is going to buy FCE, because he find that the various upgrade of FC cost many bucks. FC3 do not work with the lattest version of quicktime, he is oblige to upgrade.
FCE is a good deal, and it require time to use it at 100 %.
FC4 has two main advantages : the ability to use a compressed format, to make your project, and when it's ok to convert it in a full format. If you own a small computer like a powerbook pismo it's perfect. FC4 is not limited to DV, at the contrary of FCE.
My advice, buy FC4 if you are not happy with FCE. But if you are happy with FCE, stay with it, the next upgrade of FCE will cost less money and will give you also new features.
I'm on a Dual 1.25Ghz G4 FW800... anyway.
Originally posted by CubeDude
Apple should have an upgrade path to FCP for FCE users.
They do. You can upgrade to FCP from FCE for $699. So you actually save $1 if you buy FCE and then the FCP upgrade.
Originally posted by Powerdoc
One of my friend, who use FCP 3 on a regular basis (even it's just for fun) told me to buy FCE and not FC4. He even think that he is going to buy FCE, because he find that the various upgrade of FC cost many bucks. FC3 do not work with the lattest version of quicktime, he is oblige to upgrade. FCE is a good deal, and it require time to use it at 100 %.
Final Cut Express is indeed a good deal for what it does, but it lacks several things besides the ability to edit non-DV material. I've used Final Cut Express, and the things that bothered me most were the lack of good logging capabilities and the lack of keyframing. QuickView and the scopes also are missing in action. (If you don't know what these things are, you probably don't need Final Cut Pro's extra features.
There's a detailed listing of differences here.
As for Final Cut Pro 4: I've used it briefly. Whether you should upgrade depends largely on what you do with it. I think the big news with Final Cut Pro 4 is the extra applications you get with it. Soundtrack, LiveType, Compressor and Cinema Tools are all excellent apps that might largely justify the upgrade cost. If I'm not mistaken, Compressor uses the same distributed computing engine as Shake, so it can use any available processing power on the network to speed things up. I with Final Cut Pro's renderer had this too.
RTExtreme works as advertised; there are now more effects available in realtime, as long as you have a fast machine. You still need to render when you're done previewing, though, and that doesn't seem to be faster than before.
So I guess I'd recommand upgrading, especially if you're going to use any of the scoring-, titling- or compression-related features that are enabled by Final Cut Pro 4's new satellite apps.
-Heady