Final Cut Express?

[nifear4]

I have both FCE and FCP (using FCP on current project)

First of all there are a few annoying problems that I find about just the MAC in general.
1. Conversion for video editing or any video editing program on the MAC is DV (basically from cam-recorders)
2. Converting a 5-minute clip of a standard Xvid AVI takes up about 1.01gb. This means you need a big HD, I only have a 60gb, but a 500gb external (Thank God for that).
3. Use a program to convert your files to DV, I was using iMovie to just convert it, but I'm going to try MPEG-Streamclip
4. FCE and FCP are usually in the format of HDV or DV, so basically in the ending result you will still have to convert it to a DV, which is the annoying and a long process (do this over night or something).

While your done with the conversion, you can simply just add in the clips (drag & drop). And use the "blade tool" to cut the clips into the clips you want, etc. Also, when you add a effect, you might need to render the effect, but if its already in a DV format, then from what I know, you don't need to render it, it will render automatically (atleast thats what happened to mine.)

Then when you export, its better to export it as a DV, then run it through D-Volution (This is the program I use to convert DV to AVI or whatever, and has the Xvid Codec and the DivX codecs so no worries. Then its pretty set, you can also basic crop in this program.

The reason why you export to DV first place is so that you don't lose any quality whatsoever, then when you compress DV to another, you don't use a lot of quality, basically if you just go into D-Volution and set the file size at 100mb, your quality should be very very very similar to your original work.

Hope this helped, if you need more help just ask these people on the forums, they've been doing AMV's more than I have, but I've been converting DV non-stop for the past few weeks.[/url]