I'm fairly new to using a mac. I have been editing in imovie for about 9 months. I usually do weddings and local sporting events. imovie is pretty limited. I feel I need more, for especially for weddings. I have a powermac G5 dual 2.0 with 3 gigs of ram, my computer holds 4 gigs. I'm running OSX 10.4.6

Questions

1) Do you recommend Final Cut Studio or Express?

2) Is the larger price tag of Studio justified?

3) How much of a learning curve is there between the 2 programs?

4) What Books are recommended to help with the learning curve between imovie and the above programs?

5) Do I have enough computer and ram to run either program efficiently?

I did a search on this site and it seems most people seem to lean toward Final Cut Studio. Recently Apple put out FCE HD 3.5. This new version is the one I'd like you to compare to Final Cut Studio.

Thanks in advance

Tim Richards

Well Tim, it depends on what you need out of the software. for just editing video in DV or HDV either studio or express will work fine for you. If you want to be able to do some advanced DVD creation and Motion graphics then you may want to look into Studio. Express and Pro share the same interface so if you learn express now you can transfer those skills to pro later. Your computer can definitey hand Final Cut, if you do get Studio Motion depends heavily on the video card for realtime playback but with all that ram you can still run the program. To learn FCP I would reccommend lynda.com. you can buy a one month subscriptiopn for $25 and watch all the tutorial movies you want. They don't have any movies on Final Cut Express but like I said pro and express share a lot of features. Final Cut Express HD 3.5 AFAIK is just the same as the old version it is just universal. BTW if you buy Final Cut Express and you later want to get Final Cut Studio you will be able to get a discount as long as your Express copy is legit ;-)

Thanks Nate, the reason I asked about the computer being enough is, imovie seems to bog down a little when my project is long. Will this happen in the Final Cut programs?

I hate to recommend them due to the negative title, but the dummies books are great. The latest version of FCE has changed alot of the interface to work more like FCP...most notably, the keyframing and the inclusion of soundtrack pro. I like FCE alot, but Studio comes with lots of extras like dvd studio pro and motion.

Thanks Nate, the reason I asked about the computer being enough is, imovie seems to bog down a little when my project is long. Will this happen in the Final Cut programs?

Not to my knowledge.