[anonymous.magi]

Hi,

I am trying to decided between buying the current version of Final Cut Express from Apple, or an old used copy of an older version of Final Cut Pro on eBay. And I need to know if Final Cut Express has a couple certain features. If anyone could let me know I would very much appreciate it. Yes, I know a trip to the AppleStore would be best, but I can't easily get to one.

What I need to know is does Final Cut Express have the following features:

- 8 point garbage mattes (or at least some type of matte)
- Color smoothing filter (4:1:1 or 4:2:2 or whichever your supposed to use for miniDV)
- Chroma Key / Color Key / Bluescreen filters

If anyone could let me know I would very much appreciate it. Thanks!

[MRTrauffer]

I don't use Final Cut Express, but have done some digging around to try to help you out.

Information from the Apple website revealed that FCE does allow color & chroma keying, and pretty decent color correction.

I can check out the specific garbage matte filters at the Apple store near here tonight, and will post back what I find.

While the interfaces between FCE and FCP are very similar, I'm not familiar with what features are lacking in FCE.