There was an informal poll on the Seattle Editors Guild Facebook page a couple of months ago. About 75% of respondents said they had no immediate plans to switch from FCP legacy to another editing app. I am in this group. Of the rest, most were evenly divided between switching to FCPX or AVID MC6. There were a couple who said they were going to switch to Premiere. CS6 may change this equation. But there doesn't seem to be any particular hurry amongst producers, directors and editors to change the status quo. It's almost as if nothing has changed really amongst my clients and colleagues. They either have not noticed the FCP legacy discontinuance or don't care. I noticed a similar trend with AVID editors who would continue to work on systems that had been discontinued many years prior. For instance, a colleague called me in to work on a documentary on an old Xpress Pro system last year (which was discontinued in June of 2008). I guess editors are a conservative lot.

For my part, I will be getting CS6 Production Premium as soon as it comes out primarily for AE, Photoshop and Illustrator. But I hope to have time to evaluate Premiere (as I have done with each release). I'm very interested in evaluating the Smoke beta as well.

With version 10.0.4, FCPX is finally feeling like a usable app; it is very fast and powerful for certain kind of projects. And at the very least it is a great transcoding and quick cuts utility, even if I want to throw the rough cut back into the more familiar FCP7. Lot of potential there. I've been surprised by how many people, even at this early stage, are using it for fairly complex projects.

To be honest, my sense is that my clients, and many of the editors in the Seattle area, will switch back to AVID before they switch to any of the other apps. Personally, I'm concerned with AVID's financial situation. We'll see.

James