Final Cut Express

» see apple.com/finalcutexpress as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Final Cut Express cost $299 and needed a Mac. In 2003 those were two separate reasons it was never going to sit on my desk, and the second one did the heavier work: a Mac in Turkey that year was a special order rather than something you carried out of a shop. The software I could at least read about. The machine under it was the wall.

Apple announced it on 7 January 2003 at Macworld in San Francisco, and the name was the entire pitch. Final Cut Pro handled the full professional range of formats. Final Cut Express handled DV, which is what came out of the camcorder you actually owned, and it did so with the same timeline and the same keyboard logic. Steve Jobs described the target as "people who may not be full-time editors, but are passionate about digital video." You needed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar and a G3 or G4 running at 300 MHz, which in 2003 meant a Mac most people already had.

That was the trick, and it was a good one. Apple had iMovie free in the box for anyone who wanted to cut a holiday video, and it had a thousand-dollar professional suite for editing bays. Between those two sat the wedding videographers and the school media teachers, plus everyone who had outgrown iMovie in a weekend. Final Cut Express was built for exactly that gap. Nobody else shipped a competing DV editor on the Mac at that price, and for eight years nobody tried.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gap it filled ~

Apple built Express by subtraction rather than by crippling. Pro's format list lost every entry you could not afford to shoot in, and the rest of the application stayed where it was. The timeline behaved identically, so an Express user who later bought Pro had nothing to relearn.

Version 3 added HD in February 2005 and renamed itself Final Cut Express HD, which was a strange thing for the cheap one to get first. Version 4 arrived in November 2007 at $199, a hundred dollars under the launch price, and it could not edit AVCHD in real time: footage had to be transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec before the timeline would touch it. AVCHD was what the new tapeless camcorders recorded, and consumer camcorder footage was the product's entire reason to exist.

~ the three silent years ~

The last build of Final Cut Express was 4.0.1, released on 29 August 2008. Nothing came after it. There was no version 5 and no answer to the cameras that had replaced tape. By the time the product was formally discontinued it had been sitting on the Apple Store page untouched for two years and ten months, which is long enough that the discontinuation notice was really just a correction to the record.

~ the day it died ~

On 21 June 2011 Apple released Final Cut Pro X and removed Final Cut Express from sale the same day. The pricing is what makes the move legible. Pro X launched at $299, which was Final Cut Express's original launch price and a hundred dollars above what Express cost at the end.

Professional editors spent that summer furious about Pro X for reasons that had nothing to do with Express, and the noise buried the smaller story. The people Jobs had described in 2003, passionate but not full-time, were now choosing between iMovie and the application the professionals were refusing to use. Apple has not shipped a consumer-tier editor between those two ever since.

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