IMovie 08 or Final Cut Express?

[bigbop@mac.com]

I'm fed up with the speed of Imovie 08. It takes about 12 hours to format 2 hrs of footage to export to IDVD. All I want to do is do some simple editing and burn onto a DVD for view on PC's or DVD players.

Is FCE faster? If not what is the fastest way of getting video footage onto a DVD?

 

[-DH]

Speed often depends on many factors: processor speed, RAM, bus speed, graphics card and most importantly, the format of the video your working with. Any compressed MPEG based format (such as HDV) will be extremely processor intensive and much slower to process than higher-end HD or SD formats.

-DH

 

[bigbop@mac.com]

Thanks. I use a Canon MV890 to capture the video footage and a Powermac 8.2 with 1 GB memory and 2GHz CPU.

Is Final Cut faster?

 

[-DH]

What format are you capturing and editing?

-DH

 

[bigbop@mac.com]

ummmmmm....not sure...how do i find out? (yeah i'm ignorant i know)

 

[-DH]

ummmmmm....not sure...how do i find out? (yeah i'm ignorant i know)

Check the camera's record settings. If in doubt how to do so, consult the user's manual.

-DH

 

[bigbop@mac.com]

16:9 mini DV format apparenrtly

 

[-DH]

16:9 mini DV format apparenrtly

DV should be pretty quick woth either application. But what you're referring to isn't the editing application, it's the encoding to MPEG-2 process for DVD that's taking so long. A newer Mac would probably speed things up quite a bit.

-DH

 

[bigbop@mac.com]

Cheers. Back to the first question....is FCE faster?

 

[AviationFan]

Cheers. Back to the first question....is FCE faster?

I don't know. What I can tell you, though, is that 12 hours is not untypical for generating MPEG2 with FCP and Compressor for a two hour video, using a 2-pass encoder. High quality encoding without hardware assistance is still very slow on today's computers, and I don't believe Final Cut Express will be much different.

- Martin

 

[faustfire]

Thanks. I use a Canon MV890 to capture the video footage and a Powermac 8.2 with 1 GB memory and 2GHz CPU.

Is Final Cut faster?

Maybe I'm missing something, what's a Powermac 8.2?

 

[zioxide]

Cheers. Back to the first question....is FCE faster?

No.

They both use the same Quicktime to encode exports.