iMovie 11 vs FCE vs Adobe Premiere Element 9

[halfmonkey]

I was wondering if anybody has had any experience with all three of these video editing softwares? If you have, would you mind providing your feedback on each of them? Maybe talk about the pros and cons. I'm looking at purchasing a new HD camcorder from Canon (HF M41) and I'll be using it to film family videos. Mainly of my kids and wondering which one of these would be best suited. I'm not doing or planning on doing anything like for professional work or anything like that. Just home movies.

Adobe is fairly cheap and there are some places that are offering it on sale right now so now would be the time for me to get it while FCE is more expensive. I'm not sure if any of the Apple stores have FCE installed on their machines to mess around with but I can't say that I recall seeing it but then again I wasn't necessarily looking for it.

Thanks.

 

[martinX]

FCE is the same as FCP. FCP has some extra bits, as well as the other pro apps, but for all intents and purposes, they are the same.

Having said that, FCP X is due out in June so all bets are off until then. Chance are FCE will go the way of the dodo, but given that FCP X is expected to be only $299, I'm not sure if that will be a problem for a lot of people.

Premiere Elements has a downloadable demo (Windows only) so have a go at that in the meantime.

 

[halfmonkey]

FCE is the same as FCP. FCP has some extra bits, as well as the other pro apps, but for all intents and purposes, they are the same.

Having said that, FCP X is due out in June so all bets are off until then. Chance are FCE will go the way of the dodo, but given that FCP X is expected to be only $299, I'm not sure if that will be a problem for a lot of people.
Premiere Elements has a downloadable demo (Windows only) so have a go at that in the meantime.

Oh. I didn't realize this was coming so soon or at least rumored to be coming so soon. Maybe I'll wait on the video sfotware to see what FCX is all about.

 

[BobFrapples]

My thoughts would be start with iMovie. You already own it and they have made several nice improvements over the years, especially if your intent is just family videos. I recently tried to make the leap to Final Cut Express and the learning curve was steep. The users manual is ~1200 pages and I'm not sure when I'll use all those features.

At the Apple store near me, all of the apps are available on the machines. They aren't on the dock but if you go to the finder you'll be able to give them a trial run.

 

[InuNacho]

Last year I went from iMovie HD (11 is probably similar) to FCE and it's leaps and bounds ahead of iMovie.
I got my copy of FCE Academic at my college bookstore for $65 and other colleges around me are selling it for the same price.

 

[halfmonkey]

Last year I went from iMovie HD (11 is probably similar) to FCE and it's leaps and bounds ahead of iMovie.
I got my copy of FCE Academic at my college bookstore for $65 and other colleges around me are selling it for the same price.

Considering that you've used both iMovie and FCE, would you say that using iMovie alone for me would be sufficient? Again, I'm just using the camcorder to film family and such. Nothing professional like a wedding or anything like that so i don't necessarily need all the bells and whistle. I mainly just want to be able to take the raw footage and edit out the bad footage and put together a viewable dvd for the entire family to watch and enjoy.

 

[InuNacho]

iMovie only lets you use one video track while FCE lets you use multiple tracks. For example say you're on a week long trip and you want to make a DVD of all the highlights, all you gotta do is import all the tracks, trim them down a bit, export it, and then burn it onto a DVD.

 

[De Rocca]

Imovie can do Multitrack

Hello,

Just to let you know that Imovie 11 can do a sort of multitrack editing, but not in the way like FCP does
=> On top of the of the single video track, you can insert for instance 'picture in picture', 'side-by-side', or 'cutaway'. This last one in fact is a piece of footage that you can layer on top of the single timeline. Similar behaviour as a second timeline.
I used this to do mix a multicam recording with different viewpoints.
You can also use multiple audio tracks.
The way I used it to mix this :
I placed my base clip in the timeline, and placed my second clip with 'cutaway' option as a layer on top of the first clip. They now run parralel. Then, when i want, i cut away pieces from the 'cutaway' clip, to switch viewpoints...

Hope this can be usefull...

Lots of usefull info on Imovie 11 on youtube...