[David H dennis]

The very best way to get AE is to buy that version for $100 and then upgrade. You want a shrinkwrapped, unregistered version so you can upgrade. You’ll get the latest version for a very reasonable price. I think the upgrade’s about $250-300.

You might want 5.5 because I’m not sure 4 will even install on a modern computer. When I got it, you had to boot up MacOS 9 to install it. Then I was able to upgrade.

I really like the After Effects interface, but it’s painfully slow, especially compared to Motion with a good video card. Even on a fast computer, you need to use the postage-stamp view to get anything even vaguely close to real time playback. You have been warned.

D

[David H dennis]

I installed Tiger on my dual G5 with 5gb RAM.

FCP HD has worked flawlessly so far. For some reason Motion stopped working, so if you have Motion make sure you still have the CD for it. I’m probably going to have to upgrade to Final Cut Pro Studio to get it back again :-(.

Hope that helps.

D

[David H dennis]

As far as I know, the academic version is the same as the regular version, so it should be hidden there somewhere.

However, I remember Title 3D was a bit hard to find, so here’s how to get to it:

Look under the effects tab, Video Generators, Text and then you should see “Title 3D” right under it.

Hope that helps.

D

[David H dennis]

As another poster said, LiveType can do what you want and a lot more.

You might also want to pick up Final Cut Studio and get Motion. Motion is just plain amazing with text and is a real hoot to use.

D

[David H dennis]

Unfortunately, I’ve moved since I got Motion, and I mislaid the original CDs in the move. (I’m an absent-minded professor type and lamentably good at this sort of thing).

And yes, I did buy Motion and did not resell it or anything like that.

Are there any other ways to deal with this kind of problem?

Many thanks.

D

[David H dennis]

I have the opposite situation to you – I have a new job which gives me eligibility for the educational price, but since upgrading my existing software is the same cost as a new educational license, I will probably get the upgrade and retain rights to continue upgrading in the future.

It used to be that you could purchase shrink-wrapped older versions of FCP on eBay for about $500 and then upgrade for $250, giving you a total cost of $750 for the $1,000 package. I went that route originally and it worked out fine for me. Unfortunately, prices on eBay are sufficiently firm and upgrade costs so high that this no longer seems to work out that well. Right now I could buy FCP for about $450 and with the upgrade at $699 it winds up being about the same as the cost of a new version.

I’d recommend buying a new copy of the package if you’re no longer academic. If you are still academic, you can push things forward another product lifecycle by paying the $699. I’m not sure if there’s any particular reason to get a non-academic version until your eligibility ends.

At least as an academic I still get Tiger for $69 — a great deal by any standard.

Hope that helps.

D

[David H dennis]

Macromedia, which originally developed Final Cut Pro, actually sold it to Apple with both PC and Mac versions developed. Since it was sold while it was still under development, the Windows version was never released.

Now, of course, FCP is heavily dependent on Core Image/Video techonlogies which exist only in MacOS X, and converting it to run under Windows would be a nightmare.

It should be blindingly obvious, then, that Final Cut Pro and friends will only be available on the Mac. This would only change if Apple had to sell FCP et al to someone else, which seems wildly improbable to say the least.

D

[David H dennis]

I don’t know the answer to your rendering speed question. I can say that if you’re not doing a project that requires the melding together of multiply sized videos (i.e. DV size and 1024×768), rendering speed isn’t that much of a factor anymore. It’s certainly not like it used to be, where rendering a project guaranteed three hour breaks!

Avid’s bundle appears to be $2,495, not the higher price you quoted. It looks like you confused the “$3890 value” with the price. That being said, that’s still about double what the FCP bundle costs. The Avid bundle has 3D animation, which Apple’s doesn’t. But Apple’s bundle has sound editing and motion graphics, and they happen to be easy to learn and figure out, an area where Avid’s very weak, at least in my experience.

When I checked out Avid a year or two ago, it had a vertical cliff face learning curve. Final Cut Pro is far easier to learn, and with the new multicam support there’s not a lot it can’t do that Avid can. From what I gather the main exception is project organization features, which is still an Avid strong point.

Apple hardware is probably a bit slower per dollar than PC hardware. But that’s not the whole story. To start with, if you don’t know how to secure your PC, you will find it will become much slower than your Mac very quickly, and you will have to go to the expense of having costly people repair it. The real world is filled with even fast PCs that have received so much virii and spyware that they are essentially unusable. Within a week of buying your PC, you’re likely to see this horrible path start on your computer.

But that hardly matters in this case, because the higher cost you’re paying for your Mac hardware is more than made up by the difference in software cost between Apple’s Final Cut suite and Avid’s offering.

That nice fellow who gave all those amusing answers said that the tools don’t make the editor. And of course he’s right, in a narrow sense, since if you don’t have the talent for this, you won’t do it well. But he’s wrong too, because if you start with Avid, you’re going to be tackling an exceptionally difficult learning curve as well as trying to learn editing. If you start with Apple, you’re starting with an operating system that’s far more trouble-free, editing software that’s much easier to learn and use and so on.

I would unreservedly recommend Apple products and Final Cut Pro for editing over Avid (and any other vendor, for that matter).

Good luck!

D

[David H dennis]

Okay. Let’s say I buy Tiger tomorrow.

I can’t upgrade my FCP tomorrow since it’s not out until late May, correct?

Do I need to upgrade to QT Pro in order to use the export options in FCP 4.5’s menus, which I know rely on QuickTime? Or is this just for the QuickTime Pro application itself?

Can I continue to use my QuickTime 6 program until I upgrade FCP, or is it eradicated by Tiger?

Many thanks.

D

[David H dennis]

Could you let me in on how it would work, and what kind of additional hardware you’d need?

It sounds intriguing but I’m not sure how much use I’d be able to make out of it. It would be nice to have native knob control instead of keyboarding everything.

Many thanks.

D