Well I use Sony Vegas Pro. But it's just cut & paste, crossfades and sound.. if I'm going to do more serious work maybe I'll use 3rd application for sound. But for now Vegas does that also just fine for me.

Very fast to use, workflows to DaVinci Resolve and After Effects works etc.. what else you can ask? I love it.

Price currently seems to be $396.99. Version 12 hasn't crashed on my computer.

I use avid at work and at home - it's all I've known for many years. What's great about version 6+ is they've opened up the software to 3rd party hardware vendors. I have a Matrox MX02LE which lets me use a standard def broadcast crt monitor with an HD lcd monitor via hdmi simultaneously. So far, so good. I believe there may still be crossgrade offers for fcp users to migrate platforms to avid if they're interested.

Avid, for offline. I've been using it for 19 years. AE for complex effects/keying And probably resolve.

@vitaliy_kiselev, what makes you think avid might not survive?

I use Vegas Pro as well but don't have anything to compare it to. Easy to learn, doesn't hang and runs fast on Win7. Plug-ins run efficiently. For audio I use Cubase with a RME Fireface interface on a separate computer.

I will go for Final Cut X, and try the new and free Lightworks.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Here's an article about Avid you might find interesting. http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2013/04/whats-the-truth-about-avids-financial-position/

I've been using FCPX, mostly. $299 as most everyone knows. But the real cost is closer to $1300 when you add up all the plugins to get more pro support.

My list of "helper" apps:

• Compressor: $50

• Motion: $50

• Pro Versioner $60 (for backing up events and projects)

• Event Manager X: $5 (a must for dealing with loads of events - hopefully Apple will institute better mgmt in software)

• Xto7: $50 (hate X? send it to 7!)

• 7toX: $10 (love X? send it from 7 to X!)

• Sync-N-Link: $200 (replicates Avid functionality for syncing clips with jam synced audio)

• SliceX with Mocha: $150 (great tracker and object remover)

• Lock & Load: $100 (a much better image stabilizer)

• X2Pro Audio Convert: $150 (export to AAF)

• Pluraleyes: $200 (sync multiple clips with multiple tracks of non-timecoded audio to separate clips FCPX can't currently do that unless you make a multiclip).

• Davinci Resolve Lite: Free

Total for FCPX and helper Apps: $1325

I know that not everyone doesn't need all these apps and plugins. Some of these duplicate features in FCPX (but do them better or different). These are the apps I recommend to people that are cutting anything for broadcast in X.

Who knows what the upgrade costs to any of this will be. SliceX is pretty new, so probably no upgrade cost for a year or two. My guess is we could see an upgrade cost for FCPX later this year if 10.1 comes out. It's all over the place right now. If Apple starts charging for upgrades, most of the plugins will most likely follow suit.

Right now, FCPX is pretty stable. It has lots of little bugs and strange behavior sometimes. But it rarely crashes. You definitely need a fast system with a beefy video card for this program to be responsive. And most people say that it's best for short form projects (which I agree with right now).

I will be using Premiere CC when it comes out, too.

I run Premiere under CC as part of an annual plan at $50/month. Alternative apps may include investigating:

Edius: http://www.grassvalley.com/products/nlesoftware

Lightworks: http://www.lwks.com/

I do not use these two editing apps, just mentioning them.

Edit: As part of the topic outline, I understand that Edius is liked by it's user base and stable. As for Lightworks, there is a free version and a 1 year subscription Pro license for $60 per annum, providing more features.

I started out with Vegas over ten years ago before they added video and the last version is still getting used even if I have CS6 Cloud edition. Warp stabilizer is much better than Vegas, but nothing beats how Vegas deals with tracks and master fx. I love CS6 media browsing though. Haven't got my head around nested sequences, but it should prove more effective in the long run. Audio-wise, Vegas wins hands down :-) CS6 has proven very stable, and since Vegas 12 I haven't had any crashes. Tough choice!

I use Edius Pro. I find it to be very stable and fast. It's native intermediate codec is excellent. Most native effects will play back without rendering.
http://www.grassvalley.com/products/edius_pro_6.5

Grass Valley Edius is much more responsive on the time-line than PPro, and manages everything in real-time without the equivalent of the Mercury Engine. It works fine with cheap GPUs and without huge RAM requirements. And it's very stable.

With slower systems you may need their HD Spark card for smooth real-time video preview on an HD monitor, but with a 3930K system, I get smooth real-time on both the computer monitor and the external HD, via the Geforce card, no dropped frames.

It lacks the depth of filters available in Premiere, and there's much less third-party plugin support, but you do get the basics and Edius has an After Effects bridge which will work with some AE plugins.

It is easier to find a substitution for NLE(Premiere). But the After Effects is the real problem to find alternatives for its extended and very complex features/abilities that have become standard by now. None that I know.

Has anyone used Magix? Observations?

Timely topic, thank you. I used Sony Vegas before - fast, simple and easy.