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Macintosh Software:
Macintosh Software
As mentioned, the big difference between Mac and PC is how much of
the Mac experience is controlled by Apple. Not only does Apple make the
computer hardware and the operating system, it also, in the case of digital
video editing, makes some of the leading software application packages.
Those include iMovie for consumer-level editing and the Final Cut lineup—
Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro—for prosumer and professional editing,
respectively.
iMovie is easily the best consumer video editing package that we’ve
seen, so much so that many iMovie users find a user manual superfluous.
With iMovie 3, the feature set has been ratcheted up somewhat, so referring
to a manual might be necessary. For basic editing tasks, however, the
interface is streamlined and fairly straightforward iMovie is suited, at first blush, to home video and consumer-level editing
of organizational videos or event videos. The truth is, however, that iMovie
gets used a lot by professionals, too, who sometimes find it useful for quickly
cutting together a demo reel, a mock-up of a future project, or a quick
in-the-field edit to show a client, put on the Internet, or burn to optical
media. The interface makes it truly a simple matter to bring in digital video
clips, arrange them on the timeline, drop in simple transitions, and even
edit the audio. Then you can be back out to tape in a matter of minutes.
iMovie integrates closely with iDVD if you happen to have a DVD-R
SuperDrive in your Mac. iMovie comes with FireWire-equipped Macs
and can currently be downloaded for free or purchased as part of the iLife
package. (iDVD comes with compatible Macs, but it can’t be downloaded
otherwise; it must be purchased to upgrade older models.)
While iMovie also can add titles, transitions, and special effects to a
video—all of which would be high enough quality for the documentary video
festival circuit—it leaves off for the prosumer and professional where Final
Cut picks up. Final Cut Pro made quite a splash in its first few years on the
market, thanks partly to the fact that it was less expensive than many of the
systems with which it competed, while it promised professional-level video
editing without requiring additional hardware, as many previous solutions
had. That and an impressive interface that made editing familiar and
somewhat more simple for video professionals helped make Final Cut Pro
one of the cutting-edge tools when DV started to take off as an alternative
to analog video.
Final Cut Pro offers capabilities that go beyond a consumer-level
application such as iMovie, including professional-level transitions and effects,
the ability to color correct video, support for chromakey compositing (putting
your talent in front of a weather map, for instance), and the ability to skew
and angle your video—lots and lots of features. The interface gives you
access to 99 tracks of audio and virtually unlimited tracks of video, making
serious productions much easier to manage than what’s available with an
interface such as iMovie’s. Final Cut Pro also supports various formats,
including traditional video formats, DV, DVCAM, and others. Final Cut
Pro can also support the film and high-definition TV 16:9 aspect ratio, and
it can be used at 24 frames per second to edit film, particularly when coupled
with Apple’s Cinema Tools for Final Cut Pro.
Is Final Cut Pro overkill for what you intend to do? Apple must have
realized that somewhere between $999 professionals (Final Cut Pro) and
$0 consumers (iMovie) are some prosumer and organizational customers
who need to edit DV with a more sophisticated tool. Enter Final Cut Express
(see Figure 2.4). Final Cut Express tosses out some of the high-end options—
you can’t edit film or nondigital video formats, you can’t set up batch captures of clips, and you can’t work with third-party expansion cards, for
example—to offer the Final Cut interface and editing tools at a more
palatable $299. For users who are sticking strictly with digital video, it’s a
great way to get access to professional-level titling and effects tools without
spending quite as much money as the pros do.
We’ve talked a lot about Apple’s tools, but they aren’t the only tools
available for the Mac. Adobe makes both Premiere and After Effects for
Macintosh, which offer a cross-platform advantage of letting you use Macs
and PCs together for larger projects. Premiere’s interface is good—it’s familiar
to most folks who’ve done some editing in the past, and it offers many of
the same strengths as Final Cut. Plus, Adobe offers both Premiere and
After Effects together in the Digital Video Collection bundle, which also
includes Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for $1249 at the time of
writing—an interesting way to negate the pricing advantage of Final Cut
Express if you happen to need those other Adobe tools as well.
Some of the same names make Mac and PC solutions, so you’ll find that
Avid is a huge player in professional, broadcast-quality (and cinema-quality)
Mac-based editing, as is Media 100, Pinnacle, and Canopus. On the low
end of the market, iMovie has pretty much scared off any contenders, so
you’ll find few, if any, choices in the $50–$200 space.
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