Haven’t seen much of an argument for hardware. We have stuck with FCP7 because of our workflow and hardware. We upload media to Edit system X and on Edit system Y I simply point my scratch disc to System X and cut away. We edit over a closed Gigabit network 1080 ProRes. Has been working for years this way and it keeps our 5 edit systems humming no matter where the media is in our systems. We do not use external RAIDs. Rather each MacPro Tower has 8 terabytes of internal RAID storage across four drives. We have updated our video cards, RAM and PCI SSD startup drive to the bleeding edge of performance on these machines.
So our hardware and workflow, along with legacy projects that we refer back to a lot keep us anchored in FCP7.
We do use Photoshop and AfterEffects so I have two seats of CC 2014 and all seats have CS6.
Don’t love Premier’s media management and clunky project/sequence settings, and FCPX is just too scary a jump from the workflow we have working currently, for the past 10 years….
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com