infobong.com

Some of my students have asked me about the difference between Final Cut Pro HD and the lower-cost Final Cut Express HD, and Apple's website is profoundly uninformative on this issue. I'm not sure if it's a case of upselling customers to a product they don't need or simply poor information design, but the Princeton campus computer store has a great page devoted to the issue.

At $499 for Pro and $249 for Express, student licenses, it's something of a task to justify the extra cost, but a few features missing in Express make it unattractive for students interested in serious media creation, in particular the lack of timecode support and the lack of keyframing for effects make Express only appropriate for lightweight use.

On the other hand, I do my video editing in our lovely Studio 4B - I'm not particularly excited by the prospect of editing video on a 12" iBook screen. Some students may have fancy Mac desktop systems at home, but, if that's the case, they probably won't begrudge spending the extra $250 for the Pro version.

In related news, I went to the site for UT's campus computer store tonight to find a cheap license for OS X Tiger, and discovered that its URL is campuscomputer.com. On one hand, it makes sense that a computer store for one of the largest campuses in the country would grab that URL, but, on the other hand, it smacks of that Texan presumptuousness.