Trying to compare FCP with Media 100 for a Public Access studio

Hi all,
I am new here. I do most of the review of products for our Public Access studio. We have a couple of existing Media 100 systems and we are considering adding or upgrading our NLE capabilities. Our studio manager had a chance to look at FCP being used at our high school and she came back with a number of impressions that I wonder about and would like to vet with people who know more about FCP. So, any comments would be helpful.
The high school media person demo’d FCP for her and let her play with it a bit. After looking at it herself, she says she would definitely say Media 100 is easier to understand/use, especially if you've never used non-linear editing before. That is fairly typical of the people doing Public Access production in our town.
However, it looks to her like there are a lot of tools that come with FCP that Media 100 either doesn't have or are not easily found in it. For example, she feels FCP’s set up looks more complicated and confusing compared to Media 100’s, but in FCP you can have up to 99 video lines in a program, where with Media 100 we're just going back and forth between the a and b video lines. Plus you can have up to 99 Audio tracks on FCP as well, where our max at the moment is 8. Now as to when you would need 99 video or audio tracks, she is not sure, but it is definitely a capability that we don't have in Media 100.
Titling looked easier to her on Media 100. With FCP there were a lot of filters involved and hoops to jump through, plus she couldn't do a word with each letter a different color, for example, unless she did each letter on a different track.
The media person warned her that FCP is really large. Apparently the program itself takes up like 35 GB of space on the hard drive, and a typical 30 min. project comes in at over 100 GB! She couldn't believe it, but she was assured it’s true. Even with our longest programs, like like a School Committee meeting thqat went 3 1/2 hours, it would came in at a max of 30 GB on the Media 100. She got the impression this big difference was so because Final Cut renders everything you do, including rendering any edits you make on your footage as new files, and stores it all in a huge folder. She thinks with Media 100, you import the footage and use it as is - the only things it will render are screen freezes, transitions, and color effects. Is that sort of comparison correct (and fair), or is something being missed?
She says in her experience that something like iMovie is the most basic as far as what you can do, then Ulead would be a step above that- the editing is basically the same, but you have a few more options. Media 100 would be next as far as ease of use and understanding of the program. FCP seemed a little confusing even to her. Comments or insights?
G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Welcome to the family, maybe.
I switched from M100 about four years ago, I was never so glad to give that company the boot. A direct comparison just isn't possible but I'll try to answer some questions. There is a Media 100 forum on creativecow.net.
she says she would definitely say Media 100 is easier to understand/use, especially if you've never used non-linear editing before.< </div>
Yes, absolutely, M100 has always had an elegant and refined interface. However, the paradigm in FCP is not opaque. It's far more interesting, deeper, more complex. So, yes, it's a bit tougher to grasp. But don't sell your students/users short. They'll get it.
99 tracks is marketing BS. The serious work is done with nesting. How many public access pieces need more than 5 or 10 video tracks?
Titling in FCP depends on third party filters like Boris or tools like LiveType and Motion. The basic titling tools in FCP are lame and difficult to use, in my opinion, compared to the elegant titler in M100 (as long as you don't launch Graffiti).
The installation includes tens of gigs of animation, movie and music loop resources that you don't need to load. The suite includes Motion, LiveType, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro and FCP.
If you're shooting DV, a 3-1/2 hour show is, umm, well, you look it up, DV is DV. But if you're capturing 3 hours from each of three cameras, that's a lot of DV.
Rendering depends on lots of things. M100's native codec handles lots of realtime stuff that FCP can't unless you've got a huge Macintosh. Previewing is not a big deal at lower rez in FCP, you get used to it. .
FCP is really scary. You can look at thousands of "I'm in way over my head, HELP!" posts here. But all those folks find they slip right into the Apple paradigm, the weirdly new workflow and start exploring the wide new world of serious editing that FCP opens up. You'll hate it for a few months because it's so dramatically different from M100. You'll love it, though.
If you want to continue the thread, give the rest of the disaffected former M100 users a few days to post their comments. There are many of us here. Then maybe start a new thread, one question at a time.
bogiesan

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Comparing FCP and Media 100 file sizes

Hi again,
As suggested in the response to my prior question, one of the areas I could use help with for comparing FCP with our access studio's current Media 100 systems is the relative files sizes that can be expected with each. As I mentioned before, the feedback we got from our high school was that FCP seems to create very much larger working files than Media 100. Is that a fair comparison?
As an example, if you have an hour of material on DV, how much disk space do you expect it to take on each of the systems when you bring it in for editing?
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OK, that is a helpful start.
Does Media 100 do this, or does it
capture it using one of it's codecs?
Not really knowing that is part of my problem. Media 100 started with analog video capture which must have used a codec, and which I think creates a proprietary compressed file format. I have to suspect that DV intake is converted to that same format. If I understand correctly the analog intake offers options for the compression level so the files sizes will vary, but my impression is that the common ones are considerably smaller than 13 GB/h.
The main issue I am trying to get a handle on is that the feedback we got from the high school was that "a typical 30 min. project comes in at over 100 GB". By comparison we input a 3 1/2 hour tape on the Media 100 and use on the order of 30 GB - something like 8 GB/hour or 4 GB for a half hour. Comparing against that report from the school for FCP there seems to be some sort of disconnect that I am trying to resolve. One hint was the thought that maybe the 100 GB included additional working files beyond the basic input files - working files generated during editing I suppose. By comparison Media 100 seems to generate a minimal amount of extra files.

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