1. Dito. AE is not an editing app and hopefully never will be – for it would lose it’s strength as compositing app by that. You can see you wave form in FCP. I have been editing more than 20 music video with it – worked without any problem. Since I am very anal about syncing sound FX exactly on the beat – I’d name that the only downside of FCP: In apps like Sony Vegas you can move the in ms in the timeline, while the smallest unit in FCP is 1 frame which is 1/25sec – in PAL land. Which is not an issue most of the time, but there where moments, when I disliked that a lot.
2. Not needed for it’s no NLE. But you can press 0 on your number pad and have an audio preview played
3. I am still rocking fine on FCP 7. I do not use FCP X, but from what I see and heard, it looks like a good tool for Music Videos – at least since they fixed some of the major short comings of the first version. If you work with AE, I would rather consider switching to PPro since the integrated workflow with PS and AE is brilliant. And by now, PPro is a rock solid platform. You can play any media, un-rendered, straight away in the TL, no more transcoding needed. In terms of media management it is still a lot poorer than AVID, I think. But if you do mainly music video and are a one man band – doing offline and online in one person, I would definitely go for the PPro, AE and PS package.
Greetz,
Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang