Production Premium for cheap or mic

[FroColin]

I have an Canon VIXIA HF10 and Final cut express, I am looking to upgrade the quality of my short films and can only spend around 300 or 400 dollars.
So here is my question, should I get a shot gun mic with that money? Or should I get the Production Premium CS4 for that, I can do this for so cheap because I have a friend who works at Adobe and can get it for me for cheap. Originally I was going to get CS4 because I could get it for such a good deal, my camcorder shoots in AVCHD and FCE doesn't natively support that and so it spends forever converting it to Apple intermediate codec or whatever, I know how to use all the programs included in the suite except for illustrator, I love visual effects I think it's really fun, and a mic is boring
But using the on camera mic is terrible, and Final cut express is pretty good, it's not like I have iMovie 08 or some terrible thing like that.
So I was wondering what do you guys think?
Should I get the Production Premium for cheap or get a shot gun mic and use a broom stick for a boom?

 

[spinnerlys]

Depends on what you're looking to improve in quality.

A mic will improve the sound extensively, and if you need the sound on the "set", than a microphone will be a better investment.
The software is only to enhance the image (brightness, colour, tracking,..), a lot of things that can be done on set with proper light, white balance, tripod, ... .

What about splitting the money?

 

[RatVega]

Get a decent mic and iLife '09 if you can squeeze it in.

Randy told us he originally wrote the new iMovie (version 7) to be a "front end" to Final Cut Studio 2 but things got a bit out of hand so they productized it as iMovie 7 in iLife '08. Version 8 in iLife '09 is an excellent shot selection system for FCP or FCE since it supports XML output as well as transcoding in QT Pro. All this requires Leopard.

The bottom line: You can fix almost anything in Final Cut given enough time, you usually can't fix bad audio at all...