• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  FCP5 vs ExpressHD – HDV?

  Posted by Matt Jones on June 2, 2005 at 3:55 pm

  Is there any difference in the way ExpressHD edits and inputs and outputs HDV compared to FCP5? Do they use a intermediate codec for editing or is it Native?

  John Treffer replied 20 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Jeff Carpenter

  June 2, 2005 at 3:57 pm

  I think that Expresses uses the intermediate codec wile FCP5 is native. I have no experience with Express, but I hear people complain about that codec all the time in terms of its quality.
• 

  John Treffer

  June 2, 2005 at 5:21 pm

  FCE does only edit in Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC)
  FCP edits native HDV and AIC

  advantage of native HDV is:
  – the datarate is about a third lower, so you need much less disk space
  – you preserve better quality because you transcode at most one time (depending on use of effects and transitions) and with AIC you transcode always twice (if you go back to HDV tape).

  advantage of AIC is:
  – Apple claims it gives better realtime performance because it doesn’t need to put CPU power in decoding the HDV stream everytime it plays.
  (I am just starting on HDV now, but in my experience AIC and native HDV can handle about the same amount of realtime effects. Only on cuts the performance of AIC is better, because the MPEG2 codec usually refers to frames before and after the the edit. Also I am playing from the 2nd internal SATA disk of my G5 2GHz DP, if you’re data is on a fast RAID system the performance will probably increase if you use AIC)

  Probably it is also possible to work first in AIC and than recapture at the final stage in HDV native codec to get the maximum quality.

  To get back to your question. If you look critical you see pretty obvious difference. Than it also depends on the kind of material you edit, busy material wont reveal much of the artifects, though very slowly movinng landscapes will.

  And of course FCP is more of a pro app than FCE. So if you’ve got money, go for FCP. If not you can try FCE and consider an update to FCP later. (FCE + FCE>FCP upgrade costs the same as FCP) I am not sure though if you can upgrade your FCE project to an FCP Project.

  for FCE FCP comparisson you can also check out: https://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:fsaJPZGP4G8J:www.apple.com.au/finalcut/+compare+final+cut+express&hl=en&client=firefox-a
  The old FCE FCP4.5 comparisson (temporarily?) removed from apples site.

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