You can also change the scale (as you can in iMovie) to really work on the details.

The timeline in Final Cut Express is a true timeline, where video clips are shown over a time scale, and laid out end to end, making it easy to visually see exactly how your project is growing. No thumbnails and a dead mouse!Ĭontrast this with Final Cut Express, where, first of all, the mouse is thankfully not a living entity-nothing in any of its windows changes with mouse movement only when you press Play or click-and-drag the mouse will your screen change. End of selection I get back from my other program, and I have to start all over. Something else that I run into all the time is that, after positioning the mouse just so for a frame I want to look at, I’ll have to switch applications to do something else…which means, of course, that I need to move the mouse.

(This, thankfully, can be disabled, though the video preview playback cannot.) If you happen to click the mouse button, and you had a selection made in the clip bin…well, sorry, but it’s gone now. The large preview area will play the video frames between where the mouse was and where it now is…and even worse, it will also play any audio that’s in those video clips as the mouse moves. If you so much as bump your mouse in iMovie, many bad things can happen.

In iMovie, the mouse pointer seems to be a living, breathing entity…and I want nothing more than to crush the life out of that poor defenseless arrow. The use of thumbnails might be bearable if it weren’t for the behavior of the mouse pointer in the bin and timeline.

Imovie free