kimovie: Why Does iMovie Do Some Things "Better" Than FCE/FCP?

Many newcomers to FCE/FCP (like myself) are surprised to discover that many excellent features of iMovie are not present in FCE/FCP.

One immediately thinks of Auto Scene Detection, the Ken Burn's Effect and some of the stunning pre-set Titles like Far, Far Away.

How can this be when iMovie is "free" and FCE and FCP are very expensive?

I was airing these grievances to Tom Wolsky - who, those fresh to this forum will soon discover, is one of the most knowledgeable users of FCE/FCP on the planet.

Below is my original letter, which I now know, contains some common misunderstandings and Tom's reply.

I hope Tom does not mind me taking the liberty of reproducing his material - I considered it too good to be "lost".

My Comments to Tom:-

When I only had iMovie and Premiere I didn't mind having to import iMovie effects because the 2 programs were produced by totally different companies so you don't really expect compatibility or continuity.

As FCP/FCE were developed by Apple after iMovie, as very expensive (compared with FREE) improved capability programs, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to do everything iMovie can PLUS all the extras for which we have paid.

I suspect you will not agree with this statement - and there may be practical reasons why Apple could not put all iMovie's capability into FCE/FCP - but many people are as surprised as I was by these apparent incongruities.

Tom's Answer:-

Except for basic scroll and crawl, FCE has no built in title animation capabilities. FCE is not a development, or expansion, or in any way derived from iMovie. That's a completely separate application, developed by a separate team using a completely separate code base that's hinged largely around QuickTime and its capabilities.

The pro applications, FCP and FCE, are based on entirely different code which utilizes very little of QuickTime built-in features, using largely only its file formats.

iMovie comes from a development stream based on QT working on the product around 1997. Final Cut Pro, and later FCE, which derives from it, was developed around the same time by a team lead by Randy Ubillos who created Premiere. This was a standalone application, originally written for and owned by Macromedia, though not released, but privately shown as KeyGrip. It was briefly developed for the PC as a front end of Media100's hardware when Macromedia got out of the video business to concentrate on the web. When the Media100 deal didn't develop Apple bought it up and the code was written around DV and OS8.6 I believe and released in 1999. At that time neither application had much in the way of animated titles, and very little in common. FCP couldn't even scroll, though that came before the release of v2.

Though the two applications have developed in parallel they have never used shared code and have always had very different priorities for a different set of users. iMovie is always looking for simplicity, ease of use, neat, easy to do effect. FCP on the other hand needs to deal with different requests, EDL support, OMF support, film support, multiple formats, frame rates and resolutions, while at the same time adding features. The feature requests for that application have always been toolset enhancements such as more trimming functionality, better media management, multicamera editing, time remapping, etc. They have had no time to develop titling tools at all. In fact FCP and FCE's primary titlers were developed by outside companies, BorisFX wrote Calligraphy, and Apple purchased IndiaPro and brought in its team to develop LiveType.

It's not surprising that iMovie and FCE are so divergent. Really the only thing they have in common is that they both edit video, both working only with DV or now HDV.