I still have and use FCP 7, and would choose it over any other suite I've tried, but FCP X may eventually (with some updating) become just as good.
Exactly! I think many people who had knee-jerk reactions over FCP X were looking at it as a
drop in replacement for FCP 7. It's not. Apple didn't help the situation by immediatly discontinuing FCP 7 and not talking for the first several months FCP X was out. There's no question they handled the whole "launch" poorly - and the group at Apple responsible for it has apologized many times and recognized they whole thing was handled poorly.
FCP 7 was old, tired and riddled with legacy code. There was no way to cleanly take it to be 64
bit - so a reboot was needed. And if your going to reboot the code, why not reboot the whole workflow to more properly reflect what the underlying technology is capable, instead of sticking with old, tired metaphores like "tape" and "clips"?
If you read the well-reasoned pro reviews of FCP X - especially the pro's that have a real connection with the folks at Apple, FCP X is the
foundation for the next generation video editing
system. It's a work in progress. As pointed out, they have added some badly needed features like Multi-Cam support. But there are others like tape support that Apple will probably never directly integrate, but rely on third parties for - indeed, tape support was available from day one from third parties. Again, not all the pieces were there, but it's not like it was completely unsupported. I don't expect Apple to support features they consider "legacy" like tape. Sure, to those with a
current heavy investment in tape that may seem like a slap in the
face, but the potential user
base for pure digital is many times that of those who require tape, so Apple relying on third parties makes sense to me. And FCP X plus the plugin cost is still a fraction of what FCP 7 or other solutions were and are for some vendors.
If you look at where Apple is going with FCP X and metadat based workflow, and give it a chance I think it's probably the most exciting thing to happen to non-linear editing since it became popular in the first place. Yup, it's a work in progres - but I think if you negelct it, you do so at your (or your students) peril. No one switches NLE suits on a dime - and if your in the middle of a project even talking about upgrading versions is crazy. FCP 7 is still shipping and recieving minimal updates - just not new features, so one one has to rush into anyting - that's for sure.
Having said that, I did take advantage of Adobe's promotion for Creative Suite - I got Premiere and a bunch of other stuff for $100 over what just Photoshop alone would have cost me - not a bad deal! So thanks for mungling your message Apple - it saved me some serious money and now I have Premiere to
play around with too.