I thought about this as well, but if the student Production Suite is $400 (journey ed) I might as well have a way to continue my learnin when the year expires. I did not realize student CC locked you in for a year!
Students should be cheaper than $30 a month IMO, after all you are supposed to spend some time studying.
I disagree, it's in essence the commercial product you're getting for $30 per month with more than one application. From experience many students I've lectured buy it and pick up some freelance on the side where they use their software for not only education but for work.
Most students study from year to year, it's a cost for professional development and it's much cheaper than learning Vizrt (trust me).
Edit: I want FCPX, but i've already dropped $950 on the third suite, you know, invest in a system you can grow with (facepalm). I feel it's about time for X to get a major update. If I bought X right before they make you pay for another upgrade, I'd travel to Cuppertino just to blow my brains out.
I'm all for learning Premiere, but isn't the transcoding slower than X?
Again, its a capex cost. The difference being you by FCPX you can use it as long as you want to because it's not subscription based. FCPX and Motion are cheap compared to the adobe CS, c4d or autodesk ECS equivalents.
Seriously Motion 5 is $50 and for a newbie into motion graphics it's cheap and help you get the base fundamentals and allow you apply this to a higher end product like AE. While FCPX at $300 I think is priced perfectly for what it is.
For instance I design broadcast news graphics specifically geospatial and weather, there are software packages out there that are licensed at a superuser level at USD$8K per month.
