Intimidated by FCP Price

A

Andor

Active member
I bought one of the brand new i7 macbook pro's (all the bells and whistles of the 15" except 8gigs of RAM).

But I haven't bought FCP yet. The studio price of $1000 is just kind of intimidating. Is now a good time to buy? Is there anything I should know before I drop the money and buy it? I'm assuming there's never a price fluctuation right?
 
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The price has held pretty steady since they dropped it years ago. Even better, the upgrade price is now cheaper as well. You have to pay if you want professional editing software, whether it's FCS or Adobe CS or AVID. It isn't cheap.
 
Haw- yeah it's a drop in the bucket. A little over a decade or so ago your price of entry was $25,000+ for an Avid box. There's never been a cheaper package of NLE software. Jump in with both feet- the water is perfect.

Noah
 
Sign up for a class at your local community college. Then go and buy the student edition. Of any of those and you'll save a TON of money. Even after paying for the class. Plus you might learn something :D
 
djbobbyrhodes said:
Sign up for a class at your local community college. Then go and buy the student edition. Of any of those and you'll save a TON of money. Even after paying for the class. Plus you might learn something :D
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Yeah but these days you only save $100 on the Academic version and it's not upgradeable to the next major version of FCP. So I see little value in going the 'educational discount' route at this point.

Noah
 
NoahK said:
Yeah but these days you only save $100 on the Academic version and it's not upgradeable to the next major version of FCP. So I see little value in going the 'educational discount' route at this point.

Noah
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Oh. Didn't know that about FCP. I know AVID media composer is only $250 for students versus 2500-3000 for the non-student version.
 
djbobbyrhodes said:
Oh. Didn't know that about FCP. I know AVID media composer is only $250 for students versus 2500-3000 for the non-student version.
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True but with the Avid educational version you're not getting the complete suite, with FCS you get the identical pro package. Albeit the pricing lately sucks for students but oh well. As Shane says, $1,000 is nothing to a pro editor and compared to most college tuition prices is also not a massive cost.

Noah
 
NoahK said:
True but with the Avid educational version you're not getting the complete suite, with FCS you get the identical pro package. Albeit the pricing lately sucks for students but oh well. As Shane says, $1,000 is nothing to a pro editor and compared to most college tuition prices is also not a massive cost.

Noah
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True,

Student pricing for the entire Avid Suite is $499 (full suite is $2499). And you get 4 years of upgrades. That's a pretty sweet deal. But I agree with others here. $1k for FCS is a bargain. The Color program alone is worth that.
 
Andor said:
I bought one of the brand new quad core macbook pro's (all the bells and whistles of the 15" except 8gigs of RAM).

But I haven't bought FCP yet. The studio price of $1000 is just kind of intimidating. Is now a good time to buy? Is there anything I should know before I drop the money and buy it? I'm assuming there's never a price fluctuation right?
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Macbook Pro's are currently only dualcore.
 
You may want to consider Final Cut Express. When I was researching it everyone was telling me that most likely it will do everything you need to do - especially if you're a beginner. The full suite is great. But, it may be overkill if you don't intend on doing motion graphics and much color correcting. Just giving you another thing to think about.
 
tumbleweed said:
You may want to consider Final Cut Express. When I was researching it everyone was telling me that most likely it will do everything you need to do - especially if you're a beginner. The full suite is great. But, it may be overkill if you don't intend on doing motion graphics and much color correcting. Just giving you another thing to think about.
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But you will need to do extensive research to make sure that Express does everything that you will need it to do.

I was looking at Express when I first bought my DVX100A, but then I discovered that it couldn't edit 24p footage, so I had to go with Pro instead.

I don't know if the newest versions of Express still have that limitation, but the last release of Express was in January of 2008, so it's not exactly up-to-date software.
 
super_plus said:
Macbook Pro's are currently only dualcore.
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You're right, that was a typo. The i7's in Macbook Pro are dual core. I have multiple computers and I do that sometimes.

I've decide to get the studio from B&H Photo. There are really cheap academic copies on ebay, but I think I will be continually upgrading and the best option is to just go for it.

Thanks for the input from everyone!
 
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