I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I recently
took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by what I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special effects
program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a dvd creation
program and some sort of file format converter, which I think is called
Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a few
more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs think
about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as opposed to
continuing with the Windows series of programs that I already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of FCP, and
I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.
Would a mac powerbook pro be powerful enough to run FCP well? Is the FCP
studio software bundle really that good? I don't really want to buy another
desktop, even though it would be cheaper and probably more powerful, as I
plan to keep the PC for doing everything else.
The cost and learning curve is a consideration but not the main one. I have
always been a PC person, primarily because of cost and the ability to simply
build my own machines over the years.
I guess the ideal solution would be that Apple sold FCP for Windows. Now
that they are going to the intel processors, is that a possibility?
I realize that this is a fairly unspecific question, but I would appreciate
any opinions that people might have to offer.
Thanks a lot for any advice.

"Luis Ortega" wrote in message
...
I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by what
I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special effects
program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a dvd creation
program and some sort of file format converter, which I think is called
Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a few
more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as opposed
to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of FCP,
and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.

Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
Get After Effects.
I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro tool.
Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.

YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software for
minimal benefit.

Luis,

I have the same opinion as nappy. Using the very latest version of FCP
Studio HD on the very latest / fastest Apple Desktop workstation (Xeon Quad
MacPro 3.0GHz) I have found the rendering and previewing of content to take
far longer than the PCs I use here which are much less expensive and have
much less expensive software. I am seriously considering dumping the entire
system in fact, although there are situations where this Apple solution does
make a lot of sense, namely, if you are in an already established Apple
environment, or if you do mostly multiple camera NLE. The program called
Motion is a lot like After Effects but to me is less appealing. The
Compressor software in Final Cut is terribly slow. Most irritating to me is
the Apple pre-occupation with their Quicktime formats and the lack of
support for mpeg2.

I use the Vegas / DVD Architect suite, Premiere, and several other PC tools
which get the job done very efficiently, and I almost never turn the MacPro
on. I think a laptop running this suite would be even more disappointing in
terms of performance to say nothing of the screen space limitations unless
you also add a big monitor. Even if you did, Motion and other Apple software
uses the graphics processor card(s) for rendering, and even the extra cost
very high performance $450 card I added to this MacPro is still
marginal.....and I hate to imagine how a laptop's graphics card would waste
a lot of waiting time.

I hate to get into this Apple versus PC discussion at all, because it sparks
a lot of discussion with a lot of heat and smoke, but very little "light". I
would only caution you before spending many thousands of dollars as I did
for FCP Suite HD and Apple hardware to get a lot of opinions before taking
the plunge.

If this is Apple bashing, so be it...but I readily admit that I have owned
many Macs starting with the 512K machine over 20 years ago, have owned Apple
stock, etc......but I just do not think FCP and the hardware to support it
make the most sense for many if not most users.

Smarty


"nappy" wrote in message
...

"Luis Ortega" wrote in message
...
I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by what
I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special
effects program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a dvd
creation program and some sort of file format converter, which I think is
called Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a few
more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as opposed
to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of FCP,
and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.

Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
Get After Effects.
I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro tool.
Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.

YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software for
minimal benefit.

Since we are top posting....

FCP Studio is really looking its age compared to other offerings such as
Adobe's suite of applications. But, you'd have to be living up your own
ass if you weren't aware that Apple are making a big announcement at NAB
just a few days away now. If you are interested in FCP wait until Apple
have done one of "their look at us aren't we great" presentations at NAB
then make a decision.

It has been heavily rumoured that FCP has been given a drastic rewrite
to make use of GPU and multi-core processors along with QT itself. The
new 8 core Mac Pro is showing little or no improvement in speed over the
4 core Mac Pro in FCP so if Apple want to keep selling its Mac Pros for
editing they had better have got FCP multi threading like crazy.

You might just get a free grading system thrown in too. Apple bought
Final Touch so that might end up in the FCS box.

Other applications in FCP Studio, IMO, are excellent. Motion and DVD
STudio Pro are the two apps I bought FCS for. Motion is not an after
effects and it is not meant to be. It is much more useful than Smarty
indicates. I use it for pre-viz, DVD menus, 2d animation and IMO it is
almost superb. It lacks some features that prevent me using it more
e.g. a tracker.

FCP - Showing its age.
Motion - Good start but lacks some really useful features like a tracker
and 3d! Still work in progress.
Soundtrack - Looks nice but fails to deliver and feels like a beta
release. Logic Pro is well worth the money though.
DVD Studio Pro - IMO still second best to Scenarist.

Luis,

My advice would be to look at PremPro2 and its productions suite,
certainly have a _serious_ look at Edius and its HD accelerator boards
which are superb.

Vegas has a very poor GUI. Ideal for educators...

Wait 'til NAB before jumping.

Smarty wrote:
Luis,

I have the same opinion as nappy. Using the very latest version of FCP
Studio HD on the very latest / fastest Apple Desktop workstation (Xeon Quad
MacPro 3.0GHz) I have found the rendering and previewing of content to take
far longer than the PCs I use here which are much less expensive and have
much less expensive software. I am seriously considering dumping the entire
system in fact, although there are situations where this Apple solution does
make a lot of sense, namely, if you are in an already established Apple
environment, or if you do mostly multiple camera NLE. The program called
Motion is a lot like After Effects but to me is less appealing. The
Compressor software in Final Cut is terribly slow. Most irritating to me is
the Apple pre-occupation with their Quicktime formats and the lack of
support for mpeg2.

I use the Vegas / DVD Architect suite, Premiere, and several other PC tools
which get the job done very efficiently, and I almost never turn the MacPro
on. I think a laptop running this suite would be even more disappointing in
terms of performance to say nothing of the screen space limitations unless
you also add a big monitor. Even if you did, Motion and other Apple software
uses the graphics processor card(s) for rendering, and even the extra cost
very high performance $450 card I added to this MacPro is still
marginal.....and I hate to imagine how a laptop's graphics card would waste
a lot of waiting time.

I hate to get into this Apple versus PC discussion at all, because it sparks
a lot of discussion with a lot of heat and smoke, but very little "light". I
would only caution you before spending many thousands of dollars as I did
for FCP Suite HD and Apple hardware to get a lot of opinions before taking
the plunge.

If this is Apple bashing, so be it...but I readily admit that I have owned
many Macs starting with the 512K machine over 20 years ago, have owned Apple
stock, etc......but I just do not think FCP and the hardware to support it
make the most sense for many if not most users.

Smarty


"nappy" wrote in message
...
"Luis Ortega" wrote in message
...
I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by what
I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special
effects program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a dvd
creation program and some sort of file format converter, which I think is
called Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a few
more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as opposed
to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of FCP,
and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.
Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
Get After Effects.
I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro tool.
Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.

YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software for
minimal benefit.

New releases of FCP or an improved NLE would certainly cause me to
re-evaluate my opinion, and I am a sufficiently big Mac fanboy that I could
get sucked into buying yet another Mac and another NLE from Apple. The
forthcoming re-introduction of Premiere for the Mac is another temptation.

DVDStudio Pro is truly an excellent product, and Motion could be a real
winner if they added 3D and especially if they speed it up. I readily admit
that I did not give Motion a full try-out, but I am impatient with the
rendering performance. One of its' templates with bubbling water is nothing
short of spectacular to view, and it has excellent creative power. Also
LiveType, which both Spex and I did not mention before, does some very
unique titling effects.


A massive rewrite is a good thing for FCP IMHO. I run a little widget called
"Performance Monitor" which has a real-time bar graph of how the 4
processors are being loaded, and FCP / Compressor / Motion / etc. all show
the 4 cores being utilized almost equally with true load sharing apparently
taking place. It is my speculation that the urgency of porting FCP into a
Universal Binary, and thereby rewriting the whole shebang in whatever
codebase they used (Codewarrior, MacApp, Codeworks, C++, etc.) was the true
culprit in killing performance, since the original apps were optimized over
years for the PowerPC and its vector processing, and then needed to run
native in an Intel host when the new Macs were introduced. I suspect this
forced them to migrate very non-optimally, sacrificing run-time performance
to get it out sooner. Just a guess on my part as I certainly have no way of
knowing for sure, but there should be absolutely no reason why so much Intel
horsepower as a Quad Xeon with their fastest 3.0GHz processors and huge
caches and 1066 Mhz front side buses should run Vegas 7 like greased
lightning but run FCP like frozen molasses.

My understanding of the MacPro game plan is to offer blue laser burners to
be introduced with more HD authoring at the WWDC Developer Conference this
summer. (This comes from one of my kids who is directly connected with
Apple.) but no other hardware bumps near to intermediate term. I will wait
this one out.........

Vegas is just so fast, so competent, and so relatively cheap that I can only
conclude that FCP would need a huge re-work to regain my support and
willingness to buy into it yet another time.


Smarty

"Spex" wrote in message
...
Since we are top posting....

FCP Studio is really looking its age compared to other offerings such as
Adobe's suite of applications. But, you'd have to be living up your own
ass if you weren't aware that Apple are making a big announcement at NAB
just a few days away now. If you are interested in FCP wait until Apple
have done one of "their look at us aren't we great" presentations at NAB
then make a decision.

It has been heavily rumoured that FCP has been given a drastic rewrite to
make use of GPU and multi-core processors along with QT itself. The new 8
core Mac Pro is showing little or no improvement in speed over the 4 core
Mac Pro in FCP so if Apple want to keep selling its Mac Pros for editing
they had better have got FCP multi threading like crazy.

You might just get a free grading system thrown in too. Apple bought
Final Touch so that might end up in the FCS box.

Other applications in FCP Studio, IMO, are excellent. Motion and DVD
STudio Pro are the two apps I bought FCS for. Motion is not an after
effects and it is not meant to be. It is much more useful than Smarty
indicates. I use it for pre-viz, DVD menus, 2d animation and IMO it is
almost superb. It lacks some features that prevent me using it more e.g.
a tracker.

FCP - Showing its age.
Motion - Good start but lacks some really useful features like a tracker
and 3d! Still work in progress.
Soundtrack - Looks nice but fails to deliver and feels like a beta
release. Logic Pro is well worth the money though.
DVD Studio Pro - IMO still second best to Scenarist.

Luis,

My advice would be to look at PremPro2 and its productions suite,
certainly have a _serious_ look at Edius and its HD accelerator boards
which are superb.

Vegas has a very poor GUI. Ideal for educators...

Wait 'til NAB before jumping.

Smarty wrote:
Luis,

I have the same opinion as nappy. Using the very latest version of FCP
Studio HD on the very latest / fastest Apple Desktop workstation (Xeon
Quad MacPro 3.0GHz) I have found the rendering and previewing of content
to take far longer than the PCs I use here which are much less expensive
and have much less expensive software. I am seriously considering dumping
the entire system in fact, although there are situations where this Apple
solution does make a lot of sense, namely, if you are in an already
established Apple environment, or if you do mostly multiple camera NLE.
The program called Motion is a lot like After Effects but to me is less
appealing. The Compressor software in Final Cut is terribly slow. Most
irritating to me is the Apple pre-occupation with their Quicktime formats
and the lack of support for mpeg2.

I use the Vegas / DVD Architect suite, Premiere, and several other PC
tools which get the job done very efficiently, and I almost never turn
the MacPro on. I think a laptop running this suite would be even more
disappointing in terms of performance to say nothing of the screen space
limitations unless you also add a big monitor. Even if you did, Motion
and other Apple software uses the graphics processor card(s) for
rendering, and even the extra cost very high performance $450 card I
added to this MacPro is still marginal.....and I hate to imagine how a
laptop's graphics card would waste a lot of waiting time.

I hate to get into this Apple versus PC discussion at all, because it
sparks a lot of discussion with a lot of heat and smoke, but very little
"light". I would only caution you before spending many thousands of
dollars as I did for FCP Suite HD and Apple hardware to get a lot of
opinions before taking the plunge.

If this is Apple bashing, so be it...but I readily admit that I have
owned many Macs starting with the 512K machine over 20 years ago, have
owned Apple stock, etc......but I just do not think FCP and the hardware
to support it make the most sense for many if not most users.

Smarty


"nappy" wrote in message
...
"Luis Ortega" wrote in message
...
I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by
what I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special
effects program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a
dvd creation program and some sort of file format converter, which I
think is called Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a
few more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as
opposed to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I
already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of
FCP, and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.
Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
Get After Effects.
I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro
tool. Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.

YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software
for minimal benefit.

Smarty wrote:
New releases of FCP or an improved NLE would certainly cause me to
re-evaluate my opinion, and I am a sufficiently big Mac fanboy that I could
get sucked into buying yet another Mac and another NLE from Apple. The
forthcoming re-introduction of Premiere for the Mac is another temptation.

The word on the street is the Sunday announcement is BIG. Take huge
pinch of salt! There is some speculation that Phenomenon might be
demoed. Take even bigger pinch of salt!


DVDStudio Pro is truly an excellent product, and Motion could be a real
winner if they added 3D and especially if they speed it up. I readily admit
that I did not give Motion a full try-out, but I am impatient with the
rendering performance. One of its' templates with bubbling water is nothing
short of spectacular to view, and it has excellent creative power. Also
LiveType, which both Spex and I did not mention before, does some very
unique titling effects.

Yep, overlooked that. Live type is a useful tool.


A massive rewrite is a good thing for FCP IMHO. I run a little widget called
"Performance Monitor" which has a real-time bar graph of how the 4
processors are being loaded, and FCP / Compressor / Motion / etc. all show
the 4 cores being utilized almost equally with true load sharing apparently
taking place. It is my speculation that the urgency of porting FCP into a
Universal Binary, and thereby rewriting the whole shebang in whatever
codebase they used (Codewarrior, MacApp, Codeworks, C++, etc.) was the true
culprit in killing performance, since the original apps were optimized over
years for the PowerPC and its vector processing, and then needed to run
native in an Intel host when the new Macs were introduced. I suspect this
forced them to migrate very non-optimally, sacrificing run-time performance
to get it out sooner. Just a guess on my part as I certainly have no way of
knowing for sure, but there should be absolutely no reason why so much Intel
horsepower as a Quad Xeon with their fastest 3.0GHz processors and huge
caches and 1066 Mhz front side buses should run Vegas 7 like greased
lightning but run FCP like frozen molasses.

Yep again, but I remember the days of Vegas being dog slow at rendering
and was one of the big criticisms of it at the time. It is not beyond
the wit of Apple to get FCP optimised like the other NLEs out there.
Thankfully I only use FCP to update my vfx/compositing reel so only use
it in limited circumstances. I have found it stable tho'.


My understanding of the MacPro game plan is to offer blue laser burners to
be introduced with more HD authoring at the WWDC Developer Conference this
summer. (This comes from one of my kids who is directly connected with
Apple.) but no other hardware bumps near to intermediate term. I will wait
this one out.........


It is very easy to predict what Apple is up to with hardware these days.
Just look at Intel road maps and look at what Dell, HP et al are
offering in their configurators...

We are going ahead with getting an 8 core Mac Pro asap as Lightwave
universal will be here shortly and it will make an excellent all-in-one
renderfarm.

Vegas is just so fast, so competent, and so relatively cheap that I can only
conclude that FCP would need a huge re-work to regain my support and
willingness to buy into it yet another time.


Huge re-works are not uncommon. Vegas itself has undergone a serious
amount reworking as has Premiere Pro which in its v2.0 guise is quite
excellent I hear from people using it (people shifting from Avid as a
lot of us have done). On Sunday we'll find out whether Apple have
dropped a bollock or not...

Another good reason for going Mac is Shake even though it is EOL it is
just sooo good. For the price of a good plugin you can have the mutt's
nuts in compositing software.

Spex.. do you think shake is a better compositor than Combustion?

nappy wrote:
Spex.. do you think shake is a better compositor than Combustion?


By a long long way.

As you might know/remember I was a big fan of combustion on the PC but
since switching full time to Shake I haven't looked back. Once you get
into Shake you realise the likes of After Effects and combustion are
missing a lot of tools that are required for doing compositing at the
highest quality level. It's the difference between being nearly right
to being absolutely right.

Shake is entirely useless as a motion graphics tool it is just not what
it is designed for whereas combustion excels in that field. Before
someone replies and say Shake can do motion graphics, yeah ok if you are
a complete masochist.

Horses for courses...as always.

"Spex" wrote in message
...
nappy wrote:
Spex.. do you think shake is a better compositor than Combustion?


By a long long way.

As you might know/remember I was a big fan of combustion on the PC but
since switching full time to Shake I haven't looked back. Once you get
into Shake you realise the likes of After Effects and combustion are
missing a lot of tools that are required for doing compositing at the
highest quality level. It's the difference between being nearly right to
being absolutely right.

Shake is entirely useless as a motion graphics tool it is just not what it
is designed for whereas combustion excels in that field. Before someone
replies and say Shake can do motion graphics, yeah ok if you are a
complete masochist.

Horses for courses...as always.

good one.. thanks

Thanks, guys.
I will wait until after NAB to see what they come up with. I am currently
using Premier Pro 2 and want to see what PProCS3 has to offer along with
their production suite.
As a teacher, I can get a good deal on this.
One reason I have for wanting to go to FCP is that at my school I will
inherit a dozen G5s next term for my art studio and I need to be able to use
it well. They are currently running FCP 4 but the school may upgrade to
studio 5. Right now my lab has PPro 1 as the editor the kids use.
At home I use PPro 2 mostly. I haven't upgraded to Avid beyond version 5.2
of Xpress DV Pro HD because it seems to have outgrown my hardware specs and
has become more finicky. Also, for my interest in doing stop motion
animation, PPro seems to be a lot better to manipulate motion and layers.
What I always liked best about Avid was its great control in basic cutting
and trimming. I was equally impressed by what I saw FCP do in that area. In
my brief experience with it, it looked like it had the best features of PPro
and Avid plus a few other very attractive things. I never did get a chance
to explore the other apps in the FCP studio.

"Spex" wrote in message
...
Since we are top posting....

FCP Studio is really looking its age compared to other offerings such as
Adobe's suite of applications. But, you'd have to be living up your own
ass if you weren't aware that Apple are making a big announcement at NAB
just a few days away now. If you are interested in FCP wait until Apple
have done one of "their look at us aren't we great" presentations at NAB
then make a decision.

It has been heavily rumoured that FCP has been given a drastic rewrite to
make use of GPU and multi-core processors along with QT itself. The new 8
core Mac Pro is showing little or no improvement in speed over the 4 core
Mac Pro in FCP so if Apple want to keep selling its Mac Pros for editing
they had better have got FCP multi threading like crazy.

You might just get a free grading system thrown in too. Apple bought
Final Touch so that might end up in the FCS box.

Other applications in FCP Studio, IMO, are excellent. Motion and DVD
STudio Pro are the two apps I bought FCS for. Motion is not an after
effects and it is not meant to be. It is much more useful than Smarty
indicates. I use it for pre-viz, DVD menus, 2d animation and IMO it is
almost superb. It lacks some features that prevent me using it more e.g.
a tracker.

FCP - Showing its age.
Motion - Good start but lacks some really useful features like a tracker
and 3d! Still work in progress.
Soundtrack - Looks nice but fails to deliver and feels like a beta
release. Logic Pro is well worth the money though.
DVD Studio Pro - IMO still second best to Scenarist.

Luis,

My advice would be to look at PremPro2 and its productions suite,
certainly have a _serious_ look at Edius and its HD accelerator boards
which are superb.

Vegas has a very poor GUI. Ideal for educators...

Wait 'til NAB before jumping.

Smarty wrote:
Luis,

I have the same opinion as nappy. Using the very latest version of FCP
Studio HD on the very latest / fastest Apple Desktop workstation (Xeon
Quad MacPro 3.0GHz) I have found the rendering and previewing of content
to take far longer than the PCs I use here which are much less expensive
and have much less expensive software. I am seriously considering dumping
the entire system in fact, although there are situations where this Apple
solution does make a lot of sense, namely, if you are in an already
established Apple environment, or if you do mostly multiple camera NLE.
The program called Motion is a lot like After Effects but to me is less
appealing. The Compressor software in Final Cut is terribly slow. Most
irritating to me is the Apple pre-occupation with their Quicktime formats
and the lack of support for mpeg2.

I use the Vegas / DVD Architect suite, Premiere, and several other PC
tools which get the job done very efficiently, and I almost never turn
the MacPro on. I think a laptop running this suite would be even more
disappointing in terms of performance to say nothing of the screen space
limitations unless you also add a big monitor. Even if you did, Motion
and other Apple software uses the graphics processor card(s) for
rendering, and even the extra cost very high performance $450 card I
added to this MacPro is still marginal.....and I hate to imagine how a
laptop's graphics card would waste a lot of waiting time.

I hate to get into this Apple versus PC discussion at all, because it
sparks a lot of discussion with a lot of heat and smoke, but very little
"light". I would only caution you before spending many thousands of
dollars as I did for FCP Suite HD and Apple hardware to get a lot of
opinions before taking the plunge.

If this is Apple bashing, so be it...but I readily admit that I have
owned many Macs starting with the 512K machine over 20 years ago, have
owned Apple stock, etc......but I just do not think FCP and the hardware
to support it make the most sense for many if not most users.

Smarty


"nappy" wrote in message
...
"Luis Ortega" wrote in message
...
I value the advice that I have been given here on many occasions. I
recently took a course on Final Cut Pro 5 and I was very impressed by
what I saw.
The studio version includes a music creation program and a special
effects program that some say is comparable to After Effects, plus a
dvd creation program and some sort of file format converter, which I
think is called Compressor..
My current software is Avid Xpress DV HD and Premiere Pro 2 on Windows.
FCP seems to have all of the features of Avid and Premiere Pro plus a
few more very interesting workflow features.
My question is what people who are really familiar with these programs
think about the idea of getting a macbook pro and FCP studio 5 as
opposed to continuing with the Windows series of programs that I
already own.
I didn't have enough time to really get into all of the programs of
FCP, and I am not that familiar with how stable Apples and FCP are.
Don't be swayed by the hype PPro2 is vastly capable. As is the AVID
offering. You would be wasting money. IMHO.
Get After Effects.
I never saw any realy use in the music portion of the Soundtrack Pro
tool. Others have. But as a composer.. it was useless to me.

YOU would be spending a great deal of money for hardware and software
for minimal benefit.