@alcomposer i think the irony with fcpx is that it's easier for people who have little editing experience than it is for those of us who have used fcp7 for 10 years. we are pretty much trained in the pavlovian sense. i equate using it to standing on my head and editing with my left hand (whereas i'm a righty). it's performs counter to what i think i want to do. i'm so fast in fcp7, i can think and do at the same time. not so much with x. but i can say the same thing about premiere and avid in that i have to think before i do.

that said, i did a test of driftwood's latest settings yesterday afternoon. i decided to use x because it was going to be the fastest tool i had to get the job done. and you know what, now that i know x enough to be "dangerous," it was very useful in easily brining in an sd card. working with the footage literally immediately. quickly skimming footage for selects. dumping them in the timeline (to music!) and then worrying about the rest later.

editing the footage was not hard, but not necessarily easy either. a lot of turning on and off skim mode, which can get in the way a lot.

honestly my biggest gripe in the timeline right now (ok, i have a hundred biggest gripes ;-) is that slipping a clip on the primary storyline causes a connected clip to slide. this is very counter-intuitive and I actually think just plain wrong. especially when you're cutting a connected clip to music.

What i really like so far about FCP X is the imported media management. It will generate all the transcoded files, proxy, analysis and render files or whatever, and when you're done with the project you can just dump them. If you ever need to work on the project again, it will automatically recreate them, no questions asked.

Speaking of which, i've written a simple automator action to exclude said directories from Time Machine backup, because if something happened those files could just be recreated. It's pretty simple but I'll share it if anyone's interested.

@oneday - you can do a lot with keyboard shortcuts in FCP X. Even more than in FCP 7. You will still need to use the mouse (and yes a Wacom tablet is way, way better!) - as you did in FCP 7.

I am a professional (high-end) editor and I have been using FCP (4-7) for the past 8 years. I really like X, even though I continue to use 7 for my daily editorial job. For anything else - especially for cutting DSLR footage - FCP X is a dream come true.

Apple will not abandon the "pro" community. It'll take a few more updates to give us most of what we need (how about "copy/paste attributes"?!?!?!?!) - but the foundation is great and @5thwall is absolutely right - people with little to no editing experience pick up FCP X in no time. It's a huge learning curve for us long-time NLE users. How do you make the transition to something like X in a high-stress environment, when lots of people collaborate on different projects on tight deadlines? That's going to be the biggest challenge for Apple.

@oneday - get a trackpad. Until Apple comes up with a wonderful touch screen machine like the Sony L all in one, the trackpad will save your hands.

@5thwall @THX1965 @CurtisMack thanks for the advices, I have wacom stylus and helps a lot, but sometimes precision works demands use of mouse

@Mr_Moore

"command option v" in FCP X does indeed paste effects onto a clip, but it pastes ALL EFFECTS from one clip to the next and OVERWRITES EVERYTHING, including audio levels and keyframes! Pretty stupid and useless. FCP 7 lets you selectively add effects to clips and doesn't erase everything that's been on that clip before. I am sure the Apple FCP team will add that really major FCP 7 feature to X. I am just puzzled that it wasn't included in v1.0.

@THX1965 try total adjustment of RgbHouse http://rgbhouse.com/?p=74 This is a text layer that redirects all adjusments to your clips below. Great!!

@alcomposer you asked me awhile ago to give you an update after I finished editing my project with X. I know I'm not the first one to say this, but I definitely won't be using X on another professional project for quite some time. It was just way too buggy and not feature-rich enough. I really need stable broadcast output. The current beta iteration of that implementation is just unusable.

I also got hit with the undo bug, the audio bug, and the "not-showing-up-on-canvas-bug." I expected all these and knew when to quit and what the workarounds were. But the fact that they are there is reason enough not to use it for a paying gig.

I need to be able to edit split audio tracks on the storyline. It's too convoluted to open each clip in a timeline to turn off and on segments of channels. I can work around the trackless environment, but I need to see my channels easily.

A big gripe for me is that setting in and out points (or ranges as they are now called) don't stick and they are also not undoable or re-doable. It's very frustrating to find precise in and out points when skimming and you can lose them easily if you're not careful where the mouse pointer is located. It's just kind of a jumble.

Lastly, the lack of a viewer monitor is just crazy. I really needed the viewer to compare shots and use to match action. It's really quite a loss not to have the viewer and something I cannot do without. This is one of those things that annoys me to no end that Apple removed this from the program. It makes no sense and just comes off arrogant.

Ok, deep breath. I have, however, decided that FCPX is good for a few things. Mainly, quick rough-cut edits shot on DSLR. It's really good for that. There's a reason why it was originally called "First Cut." You can see how easy it is to very quickly log a lot of footage and skimming and favoriting clips is very easy (albeit not without its faults). I really love logging and organizing footage in it. Too bad there's so much missing at this time. But as I said above, I don't think I'm saying anything new about X at this point.

One day Tim Cook would introduce The New FCP.

It is obvious that Apple will abandon the pro market, because the Simplicity concept has won$$$ the market, and why to bother with pro users lets reinvent things and make the people so dam stupid that they do not need to think at all!

example, Apple did not update for two years the Mac Pro workstation and in that time they have launch four series of new iMac

10.0.4 just released. Official release notes are up: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4589

Final Cut Pro X version 10.0.4 improves overall stability, performance, and compatibility including: Improves image quality and responsiveness of broadcast monitoring with compatible third-party PCIe and Thunderbolt I/O devices. Improves performance of multicam syncing and editing. Adds language support for Simplified Chinese. Adds a Share option for 1080p video on compatible iOS devices.

Final Cut Pro version 10.0.4 also addresses the following issues: Assigns default audio channel setting for new projects to stereo. Includes multicam metadata in XML project export. Fixes an issue in which video superimposed over a background with an alpha channel could appear differently in Viewer before and after render. Fixes an issue that caused some titles to be rendered again after each application launch.

My first impression is that it feels faster. Thumbnails seem to render faster and loading and playing clips feels smoother. I guess the next update will launch in June, will be called 10.1 and will be the first paid upgrade. Most likely, they will introduce some new features in that release. I am content with that.

I am curious though what Avid and Adobe will show at NAB.

I hope I won’t have to rebuild all the titles in my old projects. I’ve already done it twice (10.0.1 and 10.0.2).

Also:

—Assigns default audio channel setting for new projects to stereo.

Finally!