FCPX

A quick aside from all the Turing Enigma stuff, to comment on the details that are floating around about the new version of Final Cut. A lot of people have been commenting on it after the NAB supermeet, and I have been putting off forming an opinion. Firstly, late me be clear that I am an Avid editor first and foremost but I do use FCP and I am soon to become an Apple certified trainer. I use FCP for corporate's and documentaries and find it works really well for fast editing where I am just simply assembling things on a timeline or where I want to create flashy sequences over music. I don't mind it for music videos and I also grade in Color, so I often use FCP to prep sequences for grading. But my ambition lies in editing feature films. And when I do that (as I am doing at the minute2) I want to do it in Avid because frankly, its perfect for it. I honestly can't understand how people craft dramatic scenes quickly in FCP. So my main reason for watching the sneak peak at FCPX was to determine whether this situation will be changing anytime soon. Short answer, no. FCPX looks like a great tool and will likely make what I use it for now, even easier, so I may even start using it more. But for editing features, it has moved further away from what I want. I'm sure there will be keyboard shortcuts but the focus is definitely on drag and drop editing, even more so than FCP7. And I don't want to drag and drop. I will race anybody, anytime, editing a rough cut of a dramatic scene if I can use the keyboard and they only have a mouse. There will also only be one window for viewing clips and sequences and it will alternate depending where your mouse is. Which sounds great, for when your editing a corporate on a laptop and screen space is minimal, but again, when I edit dramatic scenes I want to see the last frame of the sequence, when I'm finding the first frame of the next shot. Surely thats a must for any cut on action? The randomly appearing "magnetic" tracks also disconcert me because they will remove the idea of keeping the same stems of audio on the same track. That's important for me, when I build indivual scene sequences and then want to assemble them into a master sequence. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong and by editing corporates on FCPX i'll be converted, but these are my initial thoughts. Anyone else?