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Final Cut Express - brilliant!

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Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Mon Oct 05, 2009 4:05 pm

I've been using PE7 for the last year and previous releases for several years before that. All the time I was discovering workarounds to the quirks that kept on cropping up and had it not been for the patience of so many wonderfully experienced people around here I'd have given up quite some time ago. As it was I stuck it out until this summer and then bought myself the biggest/fastest iMac I could buy, got the dealer to load up everything I might need (including VMware Fusion for all the Windows stuff I still needed) and threw myself into a theatre production where I had videoed all four performances using four camcorders (1 AVCHD, 3 mini DV) yielding 30+ hours of video. I'm well on the way to getting it down to the performance they always wanted but never actually managed...

With lots of PE experience the learning curve hasn't been too bad but what's really made a difference is that FCE simply works and doesn't misbehave. You can choose how Paste Attributes works. Clips stay where you want them to stay on the Timeline. No crashes. The Rendering issue mentioned elsewhere around here has only cropped up once and I'd hardly describe it as an issue. There are so many better ways of doing things than I've got used to in the past with PE. FCE is simply PE on steroids.

I like to write a bit more but I just noticed that on my other screen what would have taken hours under PE7 (creating a DVD) just took 30 mins only with FCE so I'm cutting short here and getting back to my new friend. Just thought I'd let you know that it's just fine over here in case you ever think about jumping in.

Let me put it another way, I've never been a good traveller. As a child I remember being car sick and as an adult I'd rather read or sleep instead of watching the world speed by. The destination is, for me, what counts. So it is, for me, with PCs and Macs. With the PC I was constantly traveling, configuring, parameterizing, house keeping and spending all too little time on my chosen destination - video editing. With my Mac I arrive in seconds. It even boots up from cold in less than ten seconds and in not much more than fifteen seconds FCE is open with my current project. No traffic jams and no erratic engine behavior. It's truly fit for purpose.
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby moviemaker » Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:24 pm

wow! i'd love to get a mac with works one day too, i used a mac in college and it was great! it will def be the next computer i get in the future.
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Chuck Engels » Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:24 pm

Wow, that is a great testimony Brian. Have you checked out Compressor also?
That is the one thing that I really would like to have with Premiere.

It's great to know that the learning curve was easier due to your Premiere Elements experience.
Love the fact that you can adjust the Paste Attributes, that would be perfect and I could have used that this weekend in my current project.

Please continue to hang around Muvipix, we need more Final Cut people :)
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Tue Oct 06, 2009 2:13 am

Hi Chuck,

No, I don't need Compressor yet but it's good to know it's there if ever.

Yes, click on Paste Attributes and a dialog box pops up with about fifteen check boxes for all the appropriate Video/Audio attributes. When working with multiple tracks and, say, one has some colour correction, another has volume adjustments etc and you want all tracks to revert to Centre, 100% scaling then you just click on "Basic Motion" and Voila! (as we say around here) it's done for all tracks in one go.

Another frustrating thing in PE I didn't mention in my previous post was the runaway PE CTI which you and I discussed some time ago, remember? The CTI gets a mind of its own? It was happening too often for me under both Vista and XP AND PE4 (before the last upgrade) as well as PE7. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have seen this but just try to live with it.

I won't be going away from here as although I don't think I'll be upgrading from PE7 just yet (oh yes, I've been following things round here), my iMac, although transportable in it's very practical "suitcase" packing complete with carrying handle and ideal for the boot ('trunk' to you), is not the sort of thing you want to leave at checkin. A couple of weeks ago we flew off for some sea and sun and I was able to get some editing done on a portable PC we took along. On our return I imported into FCE the exported AVI from PE and now it's part of a much bigger MOV :-)
24" iMac. 17" MBP. FCPX and a little bit of Premiere Pro. Nine recent Panasonic HD camcorders. Many (but never enough) terabytes of external storage...
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:15 am

Briantho wrote:...and then bought myself the biggest/fastest iMac I could buy....


Briantho, my first computers were also Macs, including a Quadra 840AV that I still own and that I composed a lengthy illustrated book with.

But I made the switch to a PC when I discovered that my Mac would not work on certain web sites. Is that no longer an issue?

Later, when I got interested in creating slide shows and videos, I discovered that I could purchase a Windows Media Center PC and a 24-inch HD monitor for a fraction of the price of a Mac computer and monitor. And when I learned that Adobe does not make Premiere Elements for Macs, it became obvious to me that a PC is the way to go. (I was already a member of muvipix, and most of the content on muvipix is related to Adobe products.)

At present, I've got 4 HP desktop XP Media Center Edition PCs that are identical in terms of both hardware and software (they are clones of one another), and with this setup I can capture, edit and burn simultaneously (the 4th unit is available if any of my 3 "workhorses" crashes, which is rare).

Including the labor to upgrade all 4 machines (CPU, Blu-ray burner, video card, RAM) as described in my signature, and including four 24-inch HD monitors, plus what I spent for extended warranties on both the machines and the monitors, my total investment is about $8,000.

In terms of both cost and capabilties, do you believe that you are getting more "bang for the buck" from your top-of-the-line Mac and monitor? Have you found a site that is as helpful with using Final Cut as is muvipix with regard to using Adobe products?
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:25 am

Mmmm... I never heard about Macs (Safari) not working on certain sites. Perhaps I've been lucky so far but if ever I did come up against something then I'd revert to VMware Fusion which would give me the full range of tools and solutions.

I'd not really thought about 'bang for buck'. For me what is important is getting to my 'destination' and everything working predictably when I'm there and that's worth paying a bit more, even quite a bit more if needs be. Let's face it, if it was simply 'bang for buck' when comparing PCs and Macs then Microsoft would be an obscure entry in Wikipedia.

So far I've only really used the Apple FCE forum. They tend to be a bit curt by comparison with people here but the answers are good. There seem to be lots of others resources too so no worries there.
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:56 am

Briantho wrote:...8 terabytes of external storage so I can sleep at night....


Ditto that!
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby ryan_khoo » Mon Mar 22, 2010 10:15 am

Yes, I Final Cut Express is good, once I get used to it, I have been sticking to it since.

But I have only one complain. If you want to to mask out something, you can only use the default 4-point matte or 8-point matte. So it is difficult if you want to mask out say funny shape polygen. This task can be easily done in Sony Vegas as there is no limit to the number of points that you can have.

Please let me know, if we can do that in Final Cut.

Thanks

Cheers
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Mon Mar 22, 2010 10:44 am

Mmmm.. can't think of any way of doing that straight off but I'm still on the learning curve. (I'm also still overwhelmed with the ease, power and stability of the product!)

There may well be some easy way of doing this like creating a mask in Photoshop (that's just a wild guess) but I just haven't needed to do this specific thing. Why don't you ask over at the Apple Support forum? Maybe see you there..?
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby ryan_khoo » Mon Mar 22, 2010 11:37 am

Briantho wrote:Mmmm.. can't think of any way of doing that straight off but I'm still on the learning curve. (I'm also still overwhelmed with the ease, power and stability of the product!)

There may well be some easy way of doing this like creating a mask in Photoshop (that's just a wild guess) but I just haven't needed to do this specific thing. Why don't you ask over at the Apple Support forum? Maybe see you there..?


I did ask over in the Apple forum.

The understanding I have is that we cannot do it in FCE. Only can do it in Final Cut Studio.

Correct me if I am wrong but I think we cannot do it in Adobe Premiere Pro too.

But I saw somewhere where we can purchase a plugin for this to do it in FCE.

In this particular instances, I think Sony Vegas beats the rest ....
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Mon Mar 22, 2010 12:35 pm

ryan_khoo wrote:I did ask over in the Apple forum.

The understanding I have is that we cannot do it in FCE. Only can do it in Final Cut Studio.

Correct me if I am wrong but I think we cannot do it in Adobe Premiere Pro too.

But I saw somewhere where we can purchase a plugin for this to do it in FCE.

In this particular instances, I think Sony Vegas beats the rest ....



So some sort of mask created in Photoshop wouldn't do it? I'm afraid I haven't a clue about the other products' capabilities. Having had to nurse PCs along since 1981 and coax them gently to get any real work done I'm so happy that Macs just get on with it. I've heard good things about Vegas for years but let's face it, every product does SOMETHING better than the rest. The problem with Vegas is that it runs on a PC - ahhhhhhh! :-)
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Bob » Mon Mar 22, 2010 2:28 pm

The problem with a mask made in photoshop is that the points are not keyframable. With the 4 and 8 point mask, you can keyframe each point to adjust to the changes in the masked footage. Of course, it would be possible to create a mask sequence in Photoshop and use that, but that's a bit of a hassle.

After Effects has a pen tool that can create keyframable masks with an arbitrary number of points (actually it's more flexible than that as you can use bezier curves in the mask). If you have the Adobe Production Premium Suite, which has After Effects and Premiere Pro, dynamic link makes this particulary easy to do.
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby Briantho » Tue Mar 23, 2010 3:04 am

Bob wrote:The problem with a mask made in photoshop is that the points are not keyframable. With the 4 and 8 point mask, you can keyframe each point to adjust to the changes in the masked footage. Of course, it would be possible to create a mask sequence in Photoshop and use that, but that's a bit of a hassle.

After Effects has a pen tool that can create keyframable masks with an arbitrary number of points (actually it's more flexible than that as you can use bezier curves in the mask). If you have the Adobe Production Premium Suite, which has After Effects and Premiere Pro, dynamic link makes this particulary easy to do.


Ah, I didn't realise it should be keyframeable. My idea was just off the top of my head - maybe I should have asked for more detail ;-)
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Re: Final Cut Express - brilliant!

Postby ryan_khoo » Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:24 am

Briantho wrote: The problem with Vegas is that it runs on a PC - ahhhhhhh! :-)


Yes, I am waiting for the day Sony Vegas is available on the Mac !!
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