Hello Sharon,
iMovie is fine for many home videos or hobbyist applications. It's pretty capable within a very small largely avocational sphere. FCP is a full-bodied nle capable of handling nearly anything thrown at it.

Which one is right for you will depend largely on what you need to do. What are you editing? Where is it going? What type of media? etc. Since iMovie is free, give it a try first. The next intermediate step would be to Final Cut Express, in terms of cost. Then to Final Cut Pro or Avid DVExpress.

I'm editing for commercial broadcast. Again, I'm looking at straight-forward edits with some dissolves.

My advice: Just get FCP 3. You're going to need it's capabilities such as the broadcast-safe checker/corrector, the color correction facility, the audio editing facilities, etc., etc.

iMovie is not appropriate for your application.

Alternatively you could just hire a professional editor on a project basis if you don't want to dig into FCP for yourself.

If you don't want to spend the grand for FCP 3, FCP Express might be just the ticket. You can compare major differences ($700 savings) at the top of the page If you need to work from Betacam the RS-422 control might be a big factor.

This thread seems to have gone cold quick.

I just tried for the first time to use iDVD 3 and have the same problems with text buttons for scene selections. Buttons that are vertically aligned work fine in preview, but after burned to dvd they are linked and effectively only select the first chapter marker.

Also I have one motion button and although I had touble getting it to show as scaled to fit the button in edit mode, it did scale in preview mode, BUT when burned to DVD the motion video is unscaled, showing only the upper left corner of the video.

I filed a bug report with Apple...

iDVD3
 

I had several long sessions with Apple support which were frustrating. Basically they said these problems were a non-issue as far as they were concerned (this may have changed since my initial calls). Re the buttons issue - the software seems to work fine if you don't use the "free" floating option. I also have consistently gotten clean burns . . . altho others have not. The chapter marks (exported from FCP) work great!

I appreciate hearing other users comments. Perhaps as more folks start to use iDVD3 more information will be available.

I've had similar problems with my external drive. I recently upgraded from FCP 3 in OS 9 to FCP 3 in OS X, and started having problems with the quality of the footage I was capturing from my XL-1 to my external 7200 RPM (80 gig IDE drive in a firewire case).

I never did solve the problem, but now I just capture to my 30 gig internal (non-system) drive, then use the media manager tool to move the captured footage to my external 80 gig. This method seems to work fine - I have no problems playing back footage from the drive, or saving render files to it or anything - just capture.

I suspect it has something to do with firewire drivers or something specific to OSX. It may even be some kind of bottlenecking, as my camera is also plugged in via firewire - but this should only occur if they were both plugged in to some kind of firewire hub, whcih they're not.

So anyway Jeff (three Jeff's, crazy) you may want to try this if you have say, 15 to 30 gigs free space on an internal drive for swapping.

Jeff Pelletier

Single/Dual processor upgrades
 

Have any of you upgraded your Macs with a upgrade
processor like the Powerlogix? They have 1GHz single/dual
processors. I'm considering to upgrade. Wondered if there
were any kind of issues with FCP/Video?

thanks,
--james

Capturing Audio and Video to separate files?
 

To all you FCP users out there.

DO you capture audio and video seperately? I am wondering if, with three hard drives in my G4, if the performance of FCP would be improved If I choose to select physically different drives for audio and video. I know my G4-400 is no speed demon, however I just wanted to know if this tweek is worthwile or not. This machine is dedicated to FCP. No other software installed.

I don't think it would make any difference. I always keep the onboard audio as well as the seperate audio. It takes up more space, but I use that to help sync the new audio.

Try it. In some cases the separate files create sync problems, in other cases it solves them. It may provide a slight increase in performance.

I haven't heard of any problems with the single processor upgrades. Dual processor upgrades have created some problems (OS related and FCP related) for a few users. I would discuss in detail the planned upgrade with the retailer your purchasing from and see about returns if it doesn't work.

Check out http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/. They have user reports for just about every hardware configuration and upgrade card. People report any issues they have during installation and regular use. You should be able to find what you're looking for there.

Rick

I remember trying to optimize audio from a video clip in sound forge once. I saved the audio at a different rate, which blew any chance of getting it to sync. Back to step one...

MacGurus has an active upgrade forum you might want to check.