I don't buy the "old dog's can't learn new tricks" meme either... my assertion was that "old dogs don't seem to be willing to try to learn new tricks"
The implication is the same though and it's one that I find false (or at the very least drastically overstated). Like I said before, I find it laughable that people described editors that have transitioned from cutting film, to cutting linear, to cutting nonlinear (using various NLEs) as unwilling/unable to learn new practices. In my experience even many people that do switch away from FCP7 to Avid or Premiere get labeled as 'fearing change' because they didn't pick FCPX.
It's very presumptuous, and irritating, for someone that doesn't know me, doesn't know my workflow needs, doesn't know what my personal preferences are and doesn't know what my usual job requirements to insult me for not using a particular piece of software when they have absolutely no idea what my professional needs are.
It's nothing personal to you YoGramMamma, but I've seen the same careless assumption so often that it's becoming a pet peeve of mine.
In my experience, doing great work will get me work... no matter what NLE I use.
We all aren't in the same environment. In the vast majority of the gigs I work (and the gigs my peers work) I'm part of a post team (editors, assistant editors, producers, etc.,), working at a facility with an already established workflow (usually Avid or FCP7). Every bit of the process, from ingesting the first piece of footage to outputting the final masters, has already been laid out and Walter Murch himself wouldn't get the job if he refused to use whatever NLE was already in play.
For editors that just need to deliver a finished product to a client or editors that are brought in during pre-production to help create the post workflow there is certainly more flexibility in how things get done.
But to think that I should be required to use ancient (and let's be honest, FCP7 is ancient) software to do work in (now) 2014 is nuts.
I know a number of post facilities that have a dozen or two bays and have spent years (and probably millions dollars) developing FCP-centric workflows so if you want to work on the TV shows those facilities produce then you'll have to know FCP 7. These places have developed bullet proof works, they keep meeting the demands of their clients, and they have a large pool of seasoned editors to rely on. What's the incentive to uproot all of that by switching to a new NLE that's still very much in flux and has a much smaller talent pool to draw from.
Not too long after FCPX first dropped I was talking with post supervisors of a couple FCP facilities and they were pretty keen on X and how it might improve their workflow. Two years later and one place is still on FCP 7 and the other is transitioning to Premiere. Even though they wanted to like X it just didn't meet their needs. Hell, @radical.media switched to X pretty early on (they appear in the FCPX testimonial section) and then switched back to 7.
This is by no means a blanket statement that it should work for everyone... but that, again, IMO, it can work for most people... better than FCP7... if they just actually learned how to use it.
Some things don't require an in depth examination though. For example, can I get the jobs I want using FCPX? Currently the answer is "no". Until that answer is "yes" there's very little reason for me to invest a lot of time learning FCPX.
