Thoughts from the departed?

[Daniel Frome]

Went full on with Avid. Flirting with Ppro. Still sticking to the Mac platform for now.

[Dave Jenkins]

Still on FCP 7, testing Premiere CS 6, not sure about Premiere It just doesn’t seem to be where FCP 7 is now as a basic editor. Markers don’t move with edits, things like that. It does have some great features.
Waiting for FCPX to mature.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.8GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCS 3 OS X 10.6 QT 10

[Joe Mordecai]

i haven’t really posted much at all, but over the past year I’ve been learning Avid, picking at Premiere Pro, but sticking with FCP 7 and waiting for X to mature, to be honest.. I’ve downloaded the trial, watched Abba Shapiro’s tutorials on Lynda, and used it solid for a month… I think it’s great, frankly. But I’m still waiting for that golden 10.0.6 or 10.1 update to make my investment. I want X to be my primary, but I want to make sure my Avid skills are somewhat developed, even though it’s hard to re-appropriate the 10+ years of FCP skills I have into one year of playing with Avid.

In fact, in my searching for new video gigs in the NYC/Boston area, the predominant platform still seems to be FCP7. It’s got a lot of trust, and I think a lot of places (and some I’ve talked to) are holding strong with it until X gets to the right place (and to many, it’s already in that sweet spot). Some folks aren’t really in a rush to switch to anything. It’s hard to beat a $299 (or, $399) price point. I think by virtue of a love of the OSX platform and the price… everyone WANTS to make it work. My 0.02 USD.

[Baz Leffler]

We have all 4 software’s in my shop (have to cater for those ‘walk-in-the-doorer’s) but a surprising benefit I have discovered is that we are getting a lot of Avid ‘dry hires’ which rarely happened with FCP7.
I prefer FCP7 because I am not up to speed yet with Avid but I am just going to have to jump in the deep end eventually.

I suppose it would have been better if FCP7 had just shut down completely and forced me somewhere else.

Why is it that most licenses expire eg driver license, pilots license etc but not a software license….. weird….

(do marriage licenses expire?)

[Michael Gissing]

I am not doing anything for a few more months as I have too many jobs in progress or booked that are FCP7 origination and also point updates of both CS6 and Smoke will be sure to come before stable happy software is available.

Still on FCS 3 and more convinced that after a year FCPX will not be suitable as a finishing tool and that I will only need to occassionally support it as an XML format. There seem to be so many desgn concepts that are aimed at a tool for the solo op non broadcast short program maker. Although it can now be used in more collaborative workflows, most local editors have shunned it.

CS6 is the strongest candidate to suit the local market where editors feed me work to finish picture & sound. Fairlight remains the best audio finish tool and the combination of Pr and AE seems to be the best balance for picture finishing that still has to go out to HDCam & digi beta. Going to build a WIN screamer and just keep the MacPro frozen with a working FCS3. The move by Apple to smaller Tbolt machines makes me nervous about Smoke which is also not necessarily the right machine for long form doco finishing and I don’t do high end compositing TVCs. If they port to WIN 7 then worth considering.

Most local editors are not moving from FCP7 for a long while and when cameras and codecs force them to change the most likely tool is CS6. There are a few AVID MC6 editors so when AVID sort the export to da Vinci I will add da Vinci to the mix. Speedgrade is also of interest but I have no problems with round tripping to da Vinci a la Color which is still my primary grade tool. I expect da Vinci to take over as my primary grade tool in the next few months.

[Shane Ross]

I’ve moved on. Not considering FCX for anything at the moment. Other options better suit my needs.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[John Davidson]

We just delivered our final FCP7 project (knock on wood) yesterday and have been working with a variety of networks on FCPX for six weeks. We have people key wording lots of episodes of shows so editing goes MUCH faster now. We only deliver sub masters and completed string outs via tape or digital delivery (prores), so the NLE we use doesn’t matter to clients.

Any time we have a frustrating moment where we don’t know how to do something, we remember our old friends “General Error”, “Out of Memory”, and “Cannot Save Project”, and we cheer up pretty quickly.

🙂

[Marvin Holdman]

Moved on to Ppro. Still sticking with MP and MBP for the moment, but not liking the handwriting on the wall. Still mourning the continued EOL’ing of Apple’s professional products. They still make great toys though.

Starting to think about building a PC for the first time in 15 years.

Sigh….

Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv

[Alan Okey]

Avid and Smoke here. Still on a Mac, but if Autodesk ever ports Smoke to Windows I’ll switch to a PC immediately.

[Alban Egger]

I can’t believe there are so many still using FCP7. I just had to use it on a project on equipment of a network that uses it still. After a year of FCPX it is such a huge step backwards to 32-bit, tracks, unusable binstructure.
I suggest you take a long look at Avid, FCPX or CS6, because FCP7 is outdated soon.