Is iMovie performance similar to Final Cut performance on same hardware?

[sloth]

As above.. is iMovie a good representation of Final Cut Express' performance on a given set of hardware?

ie. if I find it 'fast enough' - will FCE be fast enough as well.

I've been dabbling with iMovie and I'm very impressed to date, almost impressed enough to cough up the $ for FCE, if only I could even get an idea of its performance. The Apple resellers I've visited do not have FCE installed on their machines so again, no idea how well it works

 

[Flashbulb]

depends on what you want to do. The paid softwares gives you bells and whistles with all the effects and transitions as well as editing controls you can imagine plus transcoding abilities.

quality wise, i do believe there will be a drop in quality if simply drag and drop to iMovie but its well equipped for the simple tasks which is pretty good considering it comes free with Mac.

 

[sloth]

Oh.. what I meant was performance, such as responsiveness when editing, rendering/export speeds, things like that. Thinking of running it on a Mac Mini (fully zhnged with 120GB/2GB/C2D 2.0Ghz).