Visual QuickStart Guide [Electronic resources] : Final Cut Express HD for Mac OS X

Soundtrack: Use Soundtrack's library of high-quality loops and

one-shots (non-looping musical figures and sound effects) to assemble royalty-free music tracks. You can adjust pitch and tempo of any element in real time. Truly twenty-first century.

LiveType: Select a prefabricated animated type sequence from LiveType's library to create complex animated titles, or edit the stock animated fonts in the library to create your own customized library. You can even borrow the motion paths from a LiveType animated font to animate graphic or video elements in your FCE sequence.

Do You Need Final Cut Pro?

Final Cut Express is a very capable video editing program, but if you need any of the following features, you should learn more about Final Cut Pro, Apple's professional-grade digital editing program.

If you're knee-deep in a Final Cut Express project before you realize that the feature you need is available only in Final Cut Pro, fear not. Open a Final Cut Express project in Final Cut Pro and you'll find your FCE project intactyou can pick up where you left off and enjoy FCP features.

• If you need to capture and edit video in a format other than DV or HDV: Final Cut Pro allows you to capture and edit HD, SD, DV, and analog video and film-based projects.

• If you need to log your video footage before capture: Final Cut Pro supports logging your shots as you review your footage and then capturing all or selected clips in a batch process.

• If you work with large amounts of source video and need to save storage space: Final Cut Pro allows you to capture and edit in OfflineRT, a compressed format that requires much less storage space. FCE offers a number of options for trimming media files over the course of your project.

• If you want to import and export project data for use in other editing systems: In Final Cut Pro, you can export an Edit Decision List (EDL), used for re-creating your edit on another editing system. You can export your audio tracks in Open Media Framework (OMF) format for finishing in an audio program like Digidesign's Pro Tools. FCE also supports After Effects plugins.