I have been a Mac fanatic for years, and have been with FCP since v1.0. For the record, I am currently editing a series of complex one-hour docs now, one of them with FCP and another on Premiere, and am a corporate trainer on FCP. No editing package is perfect, and I can produce a perfectly good rant about Premiere's deficiencies, but on the balance I don't like working on FCP. (For the benefit of the Mac police, Windows 7 has been rock-solid, as much as I dislike working with it.)
To me, editing a complex project is like playing chess. When I am releasing the mouse button I am already thinking several moves ahead. With FCP, however, you have to hover over each edit. I can never quite get on a good creative roll because I am constantly diverted by having to manually perform some niggling little task that other editors do automatically, and the three-point editing model here practically demands you treat it like a linear editor. All the little things that you need automated aren't and all the big things you don't want are. The constant weight of little distractions makes for a long editing day.
Even if you disagree with everything I've said which is fine, we all work differently no serious editor can deny that FCP's browser is, well, terrible. Media management is a pain. It's inconceivable that the v1 browser is still with us. There is no icon view with comments, a miserable icon list view, icons do not automatically or conveniently arrange themselves (and when they do long file names prevent a clean arrangement), folders are poorly designed, long file names do not wrap or abbreviate, there is no indication if a clip has been used on the timeline. Yes it's true that you can perform an awkward clip search, which must be repeated for each edit (not does it address the bin you are working in but rather the entire project) but this is telling of the entire design. Functions that should be at your fingertips take a myriad of steps to accomplish. PLEASE Apple look at the browser in ANY competing project and GET A CLUE.
I would also add that this program does not play well with others. Unless you are going to import into the program direct from your source files, forget it. It won't read the most common file types. Even Apple's own .mov requires rendering. AVCHD? Not a chance. Not even mpeg4's. The last show I did had multiple file formats we gave up and moved to Premiere on a PC. It just was not worth the endless rendering and megafile sizes.
The good news is that FCP does the job and is reasonably stable (but not perfect), but I have found Apple's support team to have a poor knowledge of the product. If you like it, more power to you. But I'd rather keep my mind on the script or the client and not be absorbed with the constant hair-splitting details one must manage to operate this software. Isn't getting your mind off the interface what Apple's supposed to be about?
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