My new laptop should arrive soon (Alienware m11x). I plan on buying Premiere or avid (whatever is the cheapest). I am a film student, who has taken a couple classes on Final Cut Pro. I currently own a nice machine with FCE. Film editing is a major interest of mine, and might actually be my major. However I feel that I have not done that much with final cut to commit yet (although I really really like it) My issue is I rather just keep one computer at a time (for constancy and money!). Seeing as FCP is the industry standard (at least for amateur/low level projects), would I be a fool to start learning a different system, that is not as widely used? I know that the same non linear editing fundamentals apply to both systems. Has anyone used both and can reassure that Adobe/Windows is not evil for video editing? Or should I keep my iMac and stick with final cut.?
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Going from Final Cut to Premiere...
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I started with Premiere 5 or so, then got onto Avid Media Composer (which costs around 300USD with education discount) and am still using it. From time to time I also used FCP, but wasn't really warming up to it, and I can't stand Premiere anymore.
Btw, FCP is also used for feature films since the early 2000s.
If you can get your hands on Avid via student discount, you can run it on your Mac too. And Premiere is available for Mac OS X too, so you could use all three on one machine if you want. For an editing machine there is no need to be the fastest computer on the planet, as editing is not as CPU intensive as one might think.
So all in all, if you like Mac OS X more than Windows, you can stay with Mac OS X and have access too all three editing applications (+ iMovie).
When I had to edit on Premiere Pro 1.5 in Windows, it was quite a cramp for me to do, because I don't like the philosophy of Windows' GUI.
Btw, FCP is also used for feature films since the early 2000s.
If you can get your hands on Avid via student discount, you can run it on your Mac too. And Premiere is available for Mac OS X too, so you could use all three on one machine if you want. For an editing machine there is no need to be the fastest computer on the planet, as editing is not as CPU intensive as one might think.
So all in all, if you like Mac OS X more than Windows, you can stay with Mac OS X and have access too all three editing applications (+ iMovie).
When I had to edit on Premiere Pro 1.5 in Windows, it was quite a cramp for me to do, because I don't like the philosophy of Windows' GUI.
I've used Media100 (a long while back now!), Avid and Premiere, and tinkered a bit in FCP. Currently, I use Premiere Pro CS3, and I personally love it. I have friends that use Final Cut Pro, and we pretty much agree it comes down to preference.
I'm very excited to get into the new CS5 features, specifically GPU acceleration and 64-bit. I don't think there is anything evil with Adobe. It's nice how the suite works together.
Avid wasn't that hard to master, but I just didn't prefer it in the end. That was in 2000, and they've done a lot since then, so I'm pretty much out of the current Avid scene. A colleague used Avid Xpress as late as 2007, and he was constantly asking me to do work for him on my Premiere system that he could not accomplish on his, if that tells you something.
I'm very excited to get into the new CS5 features, specifically GPU acceleration and 64-bit. I don't think there is anything evil with Adobe. It's nice how the suite works together.
Avid wasn't that hard to master, but I just didn't prefer it in the end. That was in 2000, and they've done a lot since then, so I'm pretty much out of the current Avid scene. A colleague used Avid Xpress as late as 2007, and he was constantly asking me to do work for him on my Premiere system that he could not accomplish on his, if that tells you something.
That may be due to the fact that Avid Xpress was quite an old program in 2007. We used it on machines bought in 2003/4. Of course a newer version of another editing software is able to do things an older one can't. Where I work, we had an Avid MC 12 system from 2002 or so until last year on an old G4 Power Mac and it worked well for the things we have thrown at it.
I used final cut in High school moved on into college and now i use it for work. I tried to learn avid in college but those dam symbols are too confusing 
I'm sure if someone thought/showed me Avid and I did some work with it, I would get used to it. But for me Final Cut just seems natural and I don't need to think on what I need to do to accomplish a task.
I'm sure if someone thought/showed me Avid and I did some work with it, I would get used to it. But for me Final Cut just seems natural and I don't need to think on what I need to do to accomplish a task.