Software Review:
Apple Final Cut Express 4 Video Editing Software

Andrew Burke
March 2008

The newest incarnation of Apple's mid-level editing tool, Final Cut Express 4, brings with it more features and likeness of Final Cut Pro than ever before. AVCHD support, multi-resolution timelines, advanced keyframing and color correction round out a long list of useful features. Some parts of Final Cut Express have gone missing. While Livetype 2.0 is still bundled with FCE, Soundtrack is no longer included.

Be sure to look into Final Cut Express 4 if you've mastered iMovie, or if you've become dizzy after reading about Final Cut Studio. Also, if you've been holding out on an upgrade, FCE4 should tip the scales. This version delivers more features than the last upgrade, FCE 3.5.

One feature that stands out about FCE's design is its similarity to Apple's flagship video editing tool, Final Cut Pro. The user interface is efficient, with small buttons for maximum work area. The drop-down menus are familiar. Button tools reside in the same places. Third party effects plug-ins can even be swapped back-and-forth. Just think of Final Cut Express 4 as a really big chip off the old block. But the similarities can be a kind of a double-edged sword; Final Cut Express 4 is very different from iMovie, especially iMovie '08. So, there may be a bit of a learning curve involved. Luckily, FCE4 now imports iMovie '08 projects, complete with cuts and dissolves. In the long run learning Final Cut Express 4 leaves us with the know-how to take command of a Pro-level application later on if need be.

When Final Cut Express 4 opens it takes full advantage of our widescreen LCD display. On our Apple iMac desktop computer with a widescreen 20" display, FCE4 doesn't waste a pixel. The user interface looks like this: Two dominant windows display video at the top of our screen; both 16:9 widescreen, and our Project Window, Timeline, and Edit tool buttons take up the bottom half of our screen.

Importing AVCHD footage into FCE4 is simple and straightforward. But we need an Intel-based Mac to do it. We connect our camcorder and navigate to Final Cut Express 4's new Log and Transfer window. Next, we choose our camcorder in the Finder window and watch our clips pour in. Since our camcorder splits up our video files individually, we pick out only our favorites to transfer. Now, this spiffy new window is made only for grabbing our AVCHD video. The Log and Transfer process transcodes our AVCHD footage into a more editor-friendly video file. Get ready to wait a little while, as transferring plays out in about real-time (an hour for an hour), like capturing tape. We have to fret a little, since we have a new hard drive camcorder that should help make this process faster than tape, but the advantages aren't as fruitful as we hoped they'd be. Final Cut Express 4 doesn't allow native editing of HDV or AVCHD. As an alternative, FCE4 changes our video into Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) video files. These are ‘frame accurate' and act like good ‘ol DV25 video, which is great for editing. It's really a "pay now" or "pay later" situation: we wait at the start instead of waiting for native AVCHD that has to constantly to re-render during editing. As and added bonus, the new Log and Transfer window gets us yards closer to a true "Batch Capture" feature. This allows us to select only certain parts of our video for import, cue them, and lets us walk away to leave our computer to do the work. A startling omission to Final Cut Express 4 is a mature HDV Capture window. Only a one-line dialog box appears, with few features. In the end, Final Cut Express 4 delivers video that we can edit more accurately than the native video captured by our AVCHD camcorder, but it simple HDV capture features leaving us wanting more.

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