In a very broad sense, is it safe to say the FCE is a somewhat downscale version of FCP. By that I mean they edit the same way, but you get more features with FCP or is there a lot more for the extra money in FCP?
Thanks for your patience and help.
Tom

In a broad sense, yes - the interfaces are the same, but Pro gives you more of what Express does.

However, Pro comes as part of FC Studio with a bunch of other apps, including Cinema Tools and Soundtrack Pro.

The distinction is supposed to be that Express is fine of prosumers and students, but Pro is what you want if you're into full professional production, especially if you'll be going to export to film.

This Wikipedia entry is a decent summary

Final Cut Express - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Express)

Thanks for the reply Nick. I checked out the link. Found it very helpful.

If you're asking because you want a step up from iMovie, then FCE is the next step. If you want to step up your production values over the next few years and do paid projects for clients, you may want to consider FCS.

What the Wiki page didn't cover are things in FCS that are not in FCE. When I looked at this back in the FCE 3 days, the main deal breaker for FCE was missing batch capture. When efficiency and multitasking is important to you, batch capture is a big time saver. With FCE, you preview the tape, set your in/out points then capture. Hummmm deeee dummmm slurp coffee..... kill a few minutes, rinse and repeat for each clip. With batch capture, you set the in/out points for all the clips on the tape, hit capture and come back later. All your clips are captured and organized into a folder.

Maybe they added batch capture to FCE in later versions, dunno. Anyway, ferreting out the features FCE does not have my be the most revealing and helpful for you.

Last time I looked, FCE only worked with 60i too. If that's not a concern, you can finish a movie on it OK. There is some color correction but more limited. You don't get Motion, which is very useful for lots of things. Also you don't get DVD Studio Pro, so you'd be limited to the free iDVD; same for sound.

With Final Cut Express you also don't get the ProRes intermediate CODEC.

With Final Cut Express you also don't get the ProRes intermediate CODEC.

Can ProRes be added?

No, ProRes cannot be added to FCE. FCE is limited to the codecs most commonly found in consumer/prosumer cameras: DV, HDV and AVCHD.

Intentionally crippled, you may say? Yes....but, there has to be some difference between a $200 product and a $1300 product.

Final Cut Studio includes: Final Cut Pro (editing), LiveType (titling - also in FCE), Cinema Tools (format conversion pulldown removal and film workflow management), Motion (2D and pseudo 3D motion graphics), Color (color correction), Soundtrack Pro (advanced multi-track audio mixing/editing and loop-based music creation), Compressor (compression for web & DVD) and DVD Studio Pro (advanced DVD authoring).

Considering everything it includes, Final Cut Studio is still one of the best values in media software. Take Color, for instance. Before Apple bought the software from a company called Silicon Color, it was a product called Final Touch. It's basically a quarter-million dollar DaVinci system in software. The Final Touch license was $1000 (SD), $5000 (HD) or $25,000 (2K). That's well worth the price of admission alone.

There's really no difference in the learning curve between FCE and FCP. The interface is practically identical. There's a much steeper learning curve in learning all the other Pro Apps, but you will be richly rewarded with a full-featured media production suite that allows you to do practically anything.

Thank you all for the replies. They have been very helpful.

Does Final Cut Express support control surfaces like the Behringer BCF2000 (http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/BCF2000-WH.aspx) or the Mackie MCU Pro (http://www.mackie.com/products/mcupro/index.html)? I don't see anything in the manual that discusses configuring FCE to use them, but would like an easier way to do final audio mixing on multiple tracks.