I bought FCP X when it first was released, played with it for a day and haven't opened it since.
You MUST try it again. It's soooo much better than FCP 7 now. I used Final Cut from versions 3.x - 7.x and it stomps it in so many ways. Everything from much more intuitive copy/paste attributes to a marvelous multi-cam editor. I will concede that the first week is painful when you try to learn it (And you CAN'T approach it with how you used to edit, that just. won't. work.), but it's a great step forward. It's like when I first used a magic mouse and it scrolled the opposite direction that I was used to. Now that I view it as a mouse and a gesture pad touch surface, I wouldn't have it any other way.
For crying out loud, even simple fonts in Final Cut 7 is an embarrassment to humanity. ^_^
The ONLY feature left that I will admit should give users pause is the inability to network store project files. We've found ways to work around it, but once they solve that, there's no earthly reason why anyone would ever want to touch a legacy version of Final Cut. (Or frankly, might want to try it again even if you moved to Premiere.)
In fact, here's a list for those who haven't looked lately from this link that encapsulate why I came around back to X after being underwhelmed at first...
http://daredreamermag.com/2013/01/14/could-final-cut-pro-x-be-the-nle-of-the-future/
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- Keywords and smart collections will make doc filmmakers drool. Use them! Such a breeze to find the specific clips you need.
- Quickly created smart collection to find files not yet optimized. VERY COOL.
- Selective copy and paste is terrific. Before when you pasted attributes, all attributes in a particular category (e.g. “filters”) were pasted. Now you can paste specific filters.
- Cmd-dragging a selection in a clip is great. Lovin’ the “/” key to auto play around the selection.
- Select a clip, then hit “x” to make it a selection range
- As Steve says in the tutorial, creating split edits is “crazy simple”
- Audition clips are genius. Why aren’t more people excited about this? Crazy stupid.
- Precision editor makes it extremely easy to trim and fine tune edits.
- Shift-F for reveal in Event library is sweet. Nice being able to quickly find the original media
- At one point on a real gig, I had inadvertently deleted a keyword set after spending a lot of time tagging ranges. I worried I’d have to go back to all those clips, find the ranges again, and re-tag. But FCPX remembered the ranges so all I had to do was re-create the keyword then quickly add them to each of the selected ranges.
- To-do markers are very useful.
- Timeline index makes it a breeze to quickly find tags, to-do markers, etc.
- Audio enhancements easy to use
- Retiming tools are visual and powerful. Love that you can manually affect speed of clip by just dragging retiming bar.
- It was always a pain to apply variable timing effects in FCP7. Now, it can easily be done visually using the retiming bar and the range selection tool. While the retiming bar is activated on a clip, just select a range you want affected. Then you can manually retime just that section of the clip. Holla!
- Preserve pitch for video retiming is awesome
- Say goodbye to that janky, Boris 3D titler (Blech). Easily add titles on fly, change them on-screen with easy access to formatting, fonts, alignment, and a bevvy of styles. Can even easily add a basic title or lower third
- Awesome and easy to use Multicam editor. For the life of me I could never get multicam editing to work in FCP7. It never synched right. So I just never bothered. In FCPX, it quickly and easily syncs.
