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In early 2003 Apple introduced Final Cut Express, a packaged aimed squarely at the mid-level DV professionals in the Mac crowd. Its feature set fell between those of the company's high-end professional package Final Cut Pro ($999) and the almost free iMovie editing application.
I was very impressed by Apple's first stab at a mid-level NLE application. (See Video Systems, July 2003 for reviews of the first version of Final Cut Express.) I was curious to see how the company could improve on such a good product with such a low price point. As powerful as 1.0 was, however, the new version in fact was not based on the initial product. Instead, Final Cut Express 2 has been rebuilt almost from the ground up and modeled after its more expensive cousin, Final Cut Pro 4.
As a result, FCE 2 does almost everything Apple's professional package does for a fraction of the cost. Then it adds some good tools created especially for those using the DV format.
Final Cut Express 2.0 in fact works only with DV. It's optimized for the G5 and OS X 10.3 Panther. The new version adds some exciting enhancements: up to 99 video and audio tracks, better audio enhancement and editing tools, and improved titling abilities. Perhaps most importantly, it offers realtime color correction, effects, and compositing via the RT Extreme engine, borrowed from FCP 4.
There are hundreds of transitions and filters to choose from, all of which you can preview in realtime. This saves time and helps maintain the creative flow while editing. Being able to use the color correction tool to match clips or enhance color saturation in realtime is a godsend. Now you can take that video shot under fluorescent light and match it to your outdoor footage without the need to process the indoor clip separately in a lengthy process.
You can tell immediately that FCE 2 is not reworked from the code of the original version, as the software seems quicker and more...