Hi Stephen,
You're right that there's no single consensus on which way to go, especially on this forum. But if you read some of the great COW articles published over the past 6 months and poke around the discussion threads, I think you can start to put together a pretty good picture of trends.
This thread's article by Mark Raudonis is not just an interesting story, but the first of what will likely be many similar stories coming from the high end of the industry in the next six months. Avid makes complete sense for companies with enterprise-scale needs like Mark's. Avid is and will remain the industry standard for the foreseeable future, especially in production towns like LA.
Walter Biscardi and Richard Harrington have both written about moving to Premiere Pro. Harrington
discusses the benefits of a cross-platform workflow moving between FCP7 Macs and and Premiere Pro PCs.
Biscardi recently announced and describes the thinking behind his company's
decision to go with both Premiere Pro and Avid.
For an objective look at FCPX, Jeremy Garchow
wrote a terrific article about the strengths of FCPX and Mark Morache has
an excellent real-world case study of using FCPX for short-form broadcast.
Since you're coming from ten years of FCP, Premiere Pro will be the easiest transition path moving forward. Its tools and timeline closely match FCP and importing projects from FCP works fairly well. You will learn it easily. All reports are that Adobe is getting an earful of feedback from new FCP converts and is listening very closely. CS6 is highly anticipated and a big opportunity for Adobe to win a huge new market. Rest assured, your purchase of Premiere Pro is money well spent.
If your concern is staying as employable and mainstream as possible, Avid is definitely a great way to go. Yes, the entry cost is higher, both in price and learning curve. But once you learn it, you'll have skills that are valued throughout the industry. Avid has an educational discount that makes the full version of Media Composer 6 along with 4 years of support available for $299. If you have educational or non-profit affiliations, you may be able to qualify. You can always call Avid sales and find out.
About Evan's presentation and FCPX in general - my issue isn't with missing features in the current version or even with Evan promoting a product he likes. I take issue with Apple's wholesale dismissal of an entire industry's standards, practices and language. I don't appreciate the world's largest technology company telling its most highly-skilled customers, "Hey, you're doing it wrong. Forget everything you know and have been doing for decades. Our new way is better." I find this thinking breathtakingly arrogant.
I like a lot about FCPX. For me and many others, the deal breaker is the trackless, ripple-only magnetic timeline and the many editorial workflows it fails to consider.
I've written extensively about this and we've had some great conversations about the philosophy of editorial UI here on the COW.
The questions you have to ask with FCPX is "better for whom and better for what?" I feel Evan majorly glosses over these questions in his presentation. Fine if you already know what you're doing and want to learn something new, but if you're new to editing
and don't know what you don't know, listening to him speak, you may get the impression that FCPX is all you'll ever need to learn. All I can say is good luck with that if you want to work in the big leagues. FCPX is useful and many find it fast and fun to use. The definition of "Pro" is in flux. Many businesses will put it to work. But it will be a
very long time before FCPX achieves the kind of top industry acceptance FCP Studio had at its peak. If ever.
Apple has every right to do this. But when they summarily pull the plug on a thriving, 11-year-old legacy ecosystem leaving no upgrade path forward, they shouldn't be surprised when businesses like BMP move on. No doubt they expect to make up the loss in volume.
More than anything, FCPX is an epic marketing failure, a case study for future business classes in how
not to treat business customers.
If Apple had simply called it Edit Pro Supergood or
anything else and given customers fair warning of their plans, I don't think there would have been any controversy with its release. Secrecy and ignoring feedback may work brilliantly in the consumer space, but in the enterprise world, rules are very different. Apple can afford to take a gamble on FCPX, but I doubt many businesses like BMP can now afford to take a gamble on Apple.
That said, I often recommend FCPX, mostly to colleagues who need to cut video on occasion, need more than iMovie, and have zero interest in working as editors professionally. It's cheap, powerful, and easy to learn the basics.
If I were in your shoes, I'd download the trial and give it a try. It never hurts to learn and you may like it. The one caveat is if you're not in a hurry, wait for the major update that's supposed to drop sometime early this year. The fact that Evan publicly stated that he'll be moving his facilities to FCPX after the update means expectations for meaningful improvement are high. Many believe the quality and substance of what Apple delivers will be a strong indicator of FCPX's future. One of the reasons this Debate forum is relatively quiet these days is because until the next update, there's really not that much more to say. Since the trial only lasts for 30 days, you'll have a better idea of what FCPX will ultimately offer if you can afford to wait.
As far as what I'm using, I'm still on FCP7 legacy. Just today one of my best clients emailed with a quick job recutting a promo we did two years ago -- they need to shave it down by 40 seconds for a new market. These client requests come in all the time. I need backwards compatibility for years of work. I and my partners in LA plan to stay on FCP legacy for another year or so. When we have to upgrade our Macs and legacy finally breaks, we'll likely move to Premiere Pro because we already own it as part of the CS suite. Premiere makes sense for us for all the reasons Biscardi and Harrington explain. I also made a point to relearn Avid over the holiday break, having not touched it for over 20 years when it was the front end to two 3/4" decks. After a couple days and an
excellent online tutorial from Steve Hullfish, I was back in the saddle feeling perfectly comfortable. FCP legacy is still my favorite timeline UI of all. I'll hate giving it up but I'm ready to move forward.
I'm also keeping an eye on
Lightworks because it might be awesome. I even keep FCPX around in hopes that it'll eventually talk to the rest of the world well enough to be useful as a DAM. I don't like cutting with it but the organization tools are nice and I would use them if I could export keyword collections and read them as bins containing clips in another NLE.
I think if you tried to find any consensus right now, it would boil down to this:
1) be prepared to change
2) try everything
3) use what works for you
Hope that answers your questions, good luck with whatever path you take!
_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl
