[Oliver Peters] "It seems to me that one of the key missing functions is the ability to drag a Project directly into an Event. I realize you can "open in timeline" and you can start a compound clip in the Event, but these all seem like workaraounds. Why not the same behavior as we had with bins? Assemble a timeline of selects and drag that into an Event for organization."
I very much agree and this is a really major missing piece for me.
On the one hand there is the Bill Davis school of editing for people who are deliriously happy making all their selections in a browser environment and who feel that the job is pretty much done once this has been accomplished ... OK, so I simplify for rhetorical effect, but you know what I mean!
On the other hand, there is a popular school of thought that likes to do their editing on the timeline, in the sense of making selects as a sequence rather than a folder/bin/collection of assorted clips.
The huge advantage to the latter way of working is that you can immediately see how the different clips might fit together, but also get a feel for how they flow into one another.
When you make selects in the timeline you can already feel the edit coming together as an edit (rather than just a list of decisions about what to include or exclude).
Ideas start to come together about the organization of the material that might never have occurred to you if you hadn't been working this way.
More than anything else, you get to know your material in a very real sense, but you keep watching it and rewatching it. (I've seen quite a few feature editors who even like to keep alt takes back-to-back in their scene assemblies, just so they can continously be evaluating - and re-evaluating - the different choices.)
Conversely, the former school of thought involves staring at a database of clips that is effectively inert - there is no synergy between one clip and another, not way of knowing how they might fit together from just lookoing at them this way.
And most disadvantageous of all - and I know this because I've seen too many editors work this way - a lot of good material simply gets lost because it is not being reviewed enough. There is a feeling that because the browser has been organized and selections made that the onus of reviewing the material has somehow been removed. Time and again I've seen editors looking at bins full of detailed clip names and thumbnails and all sorts of organizational aids, but not really knowing what's actually in those clips becaue they've only looked at them once.
One of the key lessons of editing is that the really good stuff - that one little moment that will really make your edit sing (or possibly get you out of that impossible hole that you can't fix any other way) will very probably be hidden somewhere you least expect it.
And I think the FCPX model with its insidiously seductive data management tools makes the danger of losing track of your material all the more acute. There's clearly even more of a sense in which the organization takes the place of the actual editing. There is a real potential for false confidence, confidence that you've rejected, and selected, the right stuff and you can start the edit from that point - without going continually going back.
Bill Davis tellingly describes this as a "two-stage process" - organize first, edit later. My concern about this is that "stage one" seems to be shutting the door on the selection process as though it's all done and dusted.
For me, and it's just a personal judgement, editing is essentially one process from start to finish and it's a process that involves continuous evaulation - and more importantly re-evaluation - of the material.
That's why I'm not sure that FCPX is necessarily a force for good in all this!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com 
