Final Cut Express

Enjoy some of the best software with final cut express.


Maybe you’re the type of person who always brings a digital camera or a good-quality camera phone with you and likes to take photos of whatever random things you encounter daily or record videos while you travel and such. Afterwards, you perhaps would want to have all those collated into one spectacular movie presentation—a travel documentary, a video birthday greeting collection for a friend, a memoir for your parents celebrating their golden anniversary, a video accompaniment to a stage play, or a short movie detailing how you and your spouse met to give away as a wedding souvenir. Yes? Well then, if you’re a Mac user, Final Cut Express would be just the thing for your video editing needs. Here’s an overview of the product:

Apple Inc., the highly successful name behind the Macintosh computer, iPod, and iPhone, had created the video editing software Final Cut Pro for professional videographers with a greater need for more advanced video editing tools. But for everyone else, both amateur and professional, they created Final Cut Express. Its fourth and latest version was released in November 2007. It now supports real-time video editing in AVCHD format (although at the moment this works for Macs with Intel processors only), imports iMovie projects (it is interesting to note that this feature is not available in Final Cut Pro), and offers new and more sophisticated filters. The program interface is similar to Final Cut Pro’s. With it you have the capability to keyframe filters and use, among others, dynamic RT (to change real-time settings), split-screen and picture-in-picture effects, opacity keyframing, motion path keyframing, motion project import, Chroma Key, two-way color correction, slip, ripple, blade, roll, and slide edits, and up to 99 audio and/or video tracks and 12 compositing nodes. Just like in Final Cut Pro, you can make use of RT Extreme in Express to allow previews of video filters and transitions without undergoing rendering. A plug-in called Boris Calligraphy for cutting-edge tilting and scrolling or crawling titles has also been inherited by Express from Pro. However, to lower its price and encourage the purchase of Logic Express, which is another Apple product, one feature that is not in Express 4 is Soundtrack. Now all of those features, for the non-technologically savvy person, would be quite inundating. But the program is quite user-friendly, considering it has been made for the rest of the non-highly professional videographer population in mind, so you can get the hang of the workings of it all in no time. Once you have, you can keep on exploring, experiment on what works best for you, discover your favorite transition or filter, and just enjoy!

How would you determine if this really is the product for you? One, if you’re a Mac user; two, if you want awesome video presentations or movies to burn in CDs or DVDs or show at gatherings like weddings or reunions; three…well, there’s really no number three. Meet those criteria? Then Final Cut Express is definitely for you.