Final Cut studio or Final Cut Express3.5
 

I am trying to figure out wheither I should buy the final Cut Studio or the new Final Cut Express. Do you get that much more bang for you buck in studio? Any help would be great.

The real questions are what do you want to do, what is your level of expertise, to what level of expertise do you aspire, do you have hardware to support Motion.. really only you can look at the comparative features of the packages and determine which one works best for you.

Ned Soltz

For straight cut and dissolve basic motion effects editing with dv or hdv final cut express will do as well as final cut pro, but if you want to get into other formats, or multicam editing, or professional dvd authoring, or audio mixing or motion graphics final cut studio is worth every penny.

Ooops, sorry! Wrong thread - please delete.

Second that. If you want a "more details than you ever wanted to know" comparison of Final Cut Express ( $299) and Final Cut Studio ( $1,299) visit these two pages on Apple's web site:

Final Cut Express Tech Specs:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutexpress/specs.html

Final Cut Studio Tech Specs:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/specs.html

In addition to a limited feature set compared to Final Cut Studio, over the years, Final Cut Express has gained lots of trickle-down technology from Final Cut Pro (and now Studio). For example, when Final Cut Studio replaced SoundTrack with Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Express gained Soundtrack, as well as when Final Cut Studio added Motion, Final Cut Express gained LiveType. For $299 it's pretty amazing to get such capable DV and HDV editor, titles, and simple sound mixing tool, and add to that iDVD, which already comes with the Mac, you got a pretty complete solution for starting out. Final Cut Studio adds the capabilities that professionals demand like the features Nate Schmidt lists above.

WOW Thanks for the advice it was all great in making my decision, I have decided to not just quite lay down 1300.00 on new software. Although I got to say Pro does look very nice. I will work my way though Express then look into the Pro.

Ned : I think have the hardware to run it G5 Dual with 1gig memory ( should I get more memory?) But I also wanted to know if the stock video card is good enough. Or if there was something out there better that I should be using for editing. In regards to videocard I want to be looking at when I get Pro that I don’t have to buy another video card. Thanks again Every one!

You're video card won't affect the editing that much, it only affects Motion's real time play back. so if you want as much realtime in motion as possible get the best card you can afford, if you're content to wait around a bit for a ram preview than don't worry about it.