I have followed (and foolishly commented on) the Final Cut Pro X "expectation" and "post partum depression" thread. As an amateur, it would appear that FCP X has been developed for me. However, it also appears that if I wanted to do some animation, I would need Motion, and if I wanted to export thing with some kind of sophistication, I may need Compressor. That's a $400 investment in a product that is, from all opinions, still in a preliminary state.
What I understood is that I would not be able to run it off my 2006 MBP, so I have ordered a 21.5" iMac i7, which I am planning to beef up to 12 or 16 GB of RAM (that's the max). Not a pro station, but all I am planning to invest in editing hardware (and I love the form factor). FCP X should run fine on this, but so should Premiere. I have started looking into Adobe's website, and I must say, I am pretty impressed by the amount of tutorial information there is for grab. The attractive thing is that I realized that I could get CS5.5 for $359, which is less than the complete product "half-suite" from Apple and contains tons more (although I may not need half of it).
Being only familiar with FCE (after migrating away from iMovie 9 out of frustration), I wonder what to do. It seems that migrating from FCP/FCE to Premiere shouldn't be too much of a problem. I am seduced by the idea of having a complete suite with which I may in the future do things that I don't know I needed to do now. Moreover, it appears that Adobe is capable of doing something that Apple pathetically says is impossible (that is importing FCP projects into a different NLE environment), which is great.
I'd be interested to hear about passionate (and not so passionate) opinions and advices on software (and possibly hardware).
Thanks!

If you've used iMovie 2010 or later, FCX isn't all that far away GUI wise. CS5.5 is more old skool NLE style. The Color Correction is weaker on the CS5.5 but there's DaVinci Resolve lite that's free. It's slower than the full production version. You obviously get a full production suite that will pump out DVD/BD from CS5.5/Resolve Lite combo, unlike FCX where you still have to buy Toast or some other software to produce discs. If your finishing is all online, then it's a viable package.

Pitfalls are that CS5.5 isn't all that accelerated without Nvidia CUDA cards with at least 96 cores and I think 800MB VRAM.I'm not familiar with the iMac range so check on that. CS5.5 is still native editing but it does not have the background rendering of FCX.

All Macs (except the Mac Pro) are now using ATI/AMD graphics cards, so no CUDA on my iMac.
Background rendering in FCPX seems to have its critics (not so inconspicuous as the term "background" would imply) on some machines with less than the maxed out Mac Pro horse power, from what I have gathered. At least I suppose that being able to render with 8 cores will help!

Bought CS5.5 Prod Premium for $309 with my new iMac. From what I understand, CUDA is not used for everything (mostly rendering some effects) and in particular not for decompressing videos. I am looking forward to long nights of learning how to use the suite...

Been using X for a bit and the key word for it is 'potential'. Right now it is missing several features that we took for granted in FC7 and we will have to wait for it to grow. For the professional, not being able to do a multi-cam shoot on X, not being able to open up older projects is a real deal breaker for many, especially the topside shooter. With Steve Jobs stepping down and what we perceive as a backward direction towards the home movie hobbiest, we can only hope that Apple moves toward improving X to, at least, its former abilities. It really is a wait and see at this point. The media management in X is quite good and the auto save seems to work just fine. However, I really don't care for their color correction tools and especially how the canvas shrinks to next to nothing when you bring up the scopes. Equally as devastating to me is that you can't see or do proper CC from the computer to an external monitor. How horrendous is that? Matrox was trying to create drivers for that purpose but something has thrown a wrench into their work and nothing is on the horizon so far.
Steve

So far (after one day) my experience with CS 5.5 has been abysmal... Premiere is not even capable of previewing H.264 clips smoothly in 1/4 resolution (17 Mbps AVCHD clips rewrapped into mov files by ClipWrap). From what I am reading on Adobe forums, this is not due to my iMac currently not having enough memory (4 GB, more on the way), as people with Mac Pros and 16GB+ have the same issue. How do they shoot all these "tutorials" on Adobe TV, showcasing smooth playback of RED footage???
I am totally bummed...

You don't need to convert into .mov.... just import into timeline. Using .mov will only use one core, which is why it's slow. It's a known bug for CS5.5 and Adobe QT server, which runs in 32 bit slowpoke!
Another workaround is to rename the files to .mpg, which is really the workaround for D7000 files. Use the original files for native.

Thanks for the tip. mts files appear indeed to be playable smoothly by PP, but they cannot be viewed within Bridge... But those are not playable by QT, so how do I preview them, except from within PP?
BTW, the mpg name change does not work for me. The files are not read correctly by QT or any other players I have on my iMac...

Note added: I went back temporarily to importing .mov files in Premiere (due to the Bridge issue discussed in the posts below) and I realized that when playing an AVCHD clip rewrapped into a .mov file, Premiere uses the 4 cores of my i7 but with a single thread per core! But when using .mts files, it uses 2 threads per core, which seems to give it enough juice to play smoothly (with effects applied)... So it is a bit more subtle than one vs multicore.

Native playback means not converting them to anything. Why would you need to use Bridge? Just use PP media browser.

Well, naively I bought into the whole story about the advantage of metadata and file management... So Bridge seemed like a good starting point in my workflow:
- drag and drop files from camcorder to disk
- use Bridge to preview clips, rename them and add keywords and other info
- backup
- start editing in Premiere

After some research, it appears that the fact that Bridge does not support mts files is an omission (it seems to have been supported in CS 4, at least on Windows, but it was relying on ActiveX support for other components of CS, which have become unnecessary in CS 5 and were therefore dropped).
This is essentially preventing from using Bridge to add metadata (to mts clips).
Premiere providing very little in terms of previewing clips (no thumbnails, workspace cluttered with all the editing tools), I am wondering whether some Mac/CS 5.5 user would have some recommendation on how to organize work.

Note: I may have found a (weird) work around! If I rename the .mov files (rewrapped by ClipWrap) as .mpg files, they remain visible within Bridge (although the playback is a bit jerky) AND they seem to be played natively within Premiere. Best of both worlds (sort of). However, I get an extra .xmp (metadata) file for each clip AND I can't play back these clips with QT (or preview then in the Finder)...

I'm following this thread keenly as I'm in the same boat and just about to take the plunge. Will be keen to hear what you make of it CS5 when you're up and running.

Thanks,

Dave

You can do all that in Media Browser within PP. Don't need to use Bridge.

I think I see what you mean by that (I switch to Window>>Workspace>>Metalogging), but I have to double-click each clip to open it in the viewer to figure out what it is (no thumbnail for instance). Bridge definitely has a much more streamline interface for media management

For instance, I can easily batch rename all my .mov files into .mpg ones in Bridge. Although they are not playable by QT, it is easy to associate them automatically with MPEG Streamclip (free), which plays them fine (I sometime get a "File open error: unrecognized file type", but if I disregard it, the clip plays fine).
However, I am not impressed by Bridge's responsiveness. Although each .mpg file gets a .xmp file associated to it (presumably to save the metadata), it takes a few seconds to get this metadata to be displayed in Bridge, which makes it a bit frustrating when tabbing rapidly through clip thumbnails.

Still experimenting... before I get started editing.

CS5.5 is growing on me...
It takes quite some learning but luckily, I have access to lynda.com's tutorials and there are plenty of free resources on the net.
So far I am favorably impressed by the dynamic link feature, which allows selecting a clip in Premiere, send it to After Effect (for stabilization for instance: the new Warp Stabilizer does miracles) and have it updated without rendering in Premiere.
Coming from FCE, I am discovering much more powerful color correction tools too.
And it appears that Audition might be something I may want to dive into next to clean up my audio tracks.
I am still lacking on memory, so some of the playback is a bit slow at times, but if I so desire, I can render the timeline, which is definitely faster than it used to be on FCE running on my MBP (it obvioulsy depends on the nature of the effect applied: warp stabilization for instance is more demanding but AE renders in the background, so in some cases forcing a render is not even necessary to get decent playback). But again, I need to check how things improve (or not) when moving from 4(!) to 12 GB (and maybe 16 GB later, if I am convinced that this could further improve things).
Now I have $100 to spend on the Apple Store (Apple promo), but not much motivation to splurge on FCP X anymore...

Final Cut Studio 7 is now back up for sale by Apple. While it is not 64bit, it is a great NLE and I would still recommend it.
Steve

Didn't see it listed back on Apple's site. The other day there was discussion of purchasing remaining units by calling Apple.

Yes, it is not available at the local mall Apple Store on Apple's online App store. You need to call 1-800-My Apple
Steve

Update: I just can't seem to get Premiere to work smoothly on my spanking new iMac... For those who have some time to waste (but not as much as I did trying to solve these issues), the story unfolds here.

I'm running PP and FCP 3 on a 27" iMac 2.8 i7 (I think) 12 gb ram and they both run sweet as. You shouldn't be getting all those issues.

What is that guy on saying that your machine isn't powerful enough..... numpty!

We need to talk! I am getting nowhere. What disk configuration are you using? Are we talking about editing AVCHD footage? That's what I am interested in and that appears to be challenging for any machine.
Right now, I have resorted to transcoding my footage to DNxHD (Avid) which of course defeats the whole purpose of using a "native editing" NLE and multiply the file size by a factor 10 (not mentioning that it takes a long time). But since I have invested in the damn' hardware and software, I can't just give up.

The guy is one of the non-Adobe gurus who prides himself of having the most powerful PC for PP editing (PPBM5.com). Which I am sure he is and has, but is not at all useful in my case.

I think it'd be more helpful if you tell us your settings and system. There are a few settings which can help.

iMac 21.5" Intel i7 2.8 GHz, 12 GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB, 1 TB internal 7200 rpm, 1TB external 7200 rpm (FW800).
I have tried different configurations within PP5.5 but haven't found one that would result 1) in smooth playback, 2) avoid PP from just becoming unresponsive after a few editing steps. Right now, Preferences>>Media has all the caches on the root drive (where the OS and programs are based) and Project Settings>>Scratch Disks has everything else on my external drive.

FW800 is not fast enough due to system bottlenecks with the 1394 bus. How much RAM did you allocate to the program? Are you optimizing the settings for "Performance" or Memory?

FW800: I don't have any other options so far (not many Thunderbolt drives out there and so far only pricey RAID enclosures). My LaCie drive also has an eSATA port and I think TB to eSATA adapters will eventually show up (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/turnkey/iMac_2010_27) but not as of today...
RAM: 9 GB for CS5.5 (I usually only run PP, but I am planning to use AE).
Optimization: Performance.

I managed to have it work fine with the DNxHD transcoded footage (at least playback is smooth with moderate editing such as color correction, speed modification and title layer) so I will try continuing this way at this time. But overall I am mighty disappointed. I don't think FCP X would have done any better though...

Switch to Memory. Make sure you set resolution of playback to 1/4.

I am pretty sure I have tried that with no noticeable difference.

What I am particularly disgruntled about is the lack of warning (or benchmark) for Adobe's products on Apple hardware. It is not like there is an infinite variety of products like in the PC world. But in retrospect, I should only blame myself for having fallen for the Adobe TV ads. Kevin Monahan's comment that "Premiere Pro CS5 and CS5.5 do run just fine on Macs. Unfortunately, the iMac is not the best choice for editing AVCHD footage. It's some of the toughest footage to edit with. I would recommend a MacPro with a qualified NVIDIA card. Even more RAM would be ideal. Premiere Pro is a 64 bit application, so you really do need a beefier system to run it, be it Mac or PC" is a bit disingenuous to use an understatement.
It is in any case not very helpful to target the right hardware (the link he provides after his remark is entirely dedicated to PCs and again, since there is no benchmark for Apple hardware, you are basically on your own to figure what to buy).

Aaahh big diffence is that I'm not working with AVCHD, sorry.
Have you tried transcoding to cineform or prores?

That makes sense. I don't have ProRes codecs as it does not come with FCE (which I was using prior to the switch to PP) but as I said, I downloaded the Avid codecs which apparently are as good if not better than ProRes ones and this works. I also downloaded the cineform codecs, but for whatever reason, neither Adobe Media Encoder not MPEG Streamclip have managed to do anything with them (some error occurs and the transcoding fails).

UW Explorer, Why don't you download MPEG Streamclip, which is free and bugless, and just transcode your AVCHD footage to a codec that works in FCE? FCE really did not come with too many codec choices but M.S. should do the job quite well for you.
Steve

Steve, as stated in my previous post, I have MPEG StreamClip and I have migrated AWAY from FCE (which I used with AVCHD footage, which forced me to render EVERY single clip/effect I added). The irony is that I thought that I could avoid rendering (and still use native AVCHD clips) by migrating to Premiere...

All right. After a few weeks of using CS 5.5 Production Premium as a complete amateur, I have come up with some conclusions:

1) First, do not buy into Adobe claims that Premiere edits AVCHD (or H.264) footage natively. It does may, but ONLY if you meet some very specific hardware specifications, and then some. I already pointed to a "discussion" started with Kevin Monahan on Adobe's TV site. This thread on Adobe's forum will show that I am not the delusional guy on the block... I must add that I strongly suspect that this is also the case for FCPX, although at least FCPX does not hide that you always have the option to render your timeline if playback becomes frustratingly slow. In a nutshell, even with the most powerful Mac Pro, you might will encounter problems.

2) This being said, once this fact has settled down in you, what is true is that you can edit OK, if not always perfectly smoothly, provided you transcode your footage (there is no background rendering in PP, so transcoding is actually a better idea, even though it results in large files). I am talking about my limited experience of editing CX550V (AVCHD 24 Mbps) and HX5V (AVCHD 17 Mbps) footage on a 21.5" iMac i7. I am not sure my external FW800 7200 rpm hardrive helps with that, but I certainly would recommend to follow the advice of others to have as many fast internal hard drives in your machine and go for as many cores as possible (I chose i7 because it has 4 cores +4 virtual cores and they often are used at 100% capacity during playback OF MY edited TRANSCODED FOOTAGE).

3) One thing you can do is to perform your edits on the transcoded footage (including dynamically linked compositions in After Effet - which I used for stabilization only so far) and before you render everything, replace this footage with your originals. Just don't try to play your timeline. It won't work. However rendering works like a charm, without quality loss due to the transcoding (if you are suspecting any).

4) Another option is to totally give up Macs and go for a Windows beast. But who would call that a "migration"?

Disclaimer: I may have a few things wrong or upside down, but I hope this may help. Comments welcome.

Not sure if you saw the update for Final Cut X, the most important being that there is a free download/trial of the software.

When I first tried it, ran into some issues, partly being unfamiliar with it. And there are still some features I would like to see and cannot move away from 7 for some things. That being said, it was quick to edit a multicam shoot (3 cameras) though Plural Eyes to synch things, had two stationary cams and a hand held cam (actually my 5D Mark II) so I knew what I was to going to get generally, plus the playback and the quick ability to show/hide things made it painless. (I have worked on projects where people edit 5 or 6 cameras this way as compared to multi cam viewer.)

I am going to give it a whirl on a couple of other projects coming up.

Not saying it does not have warts or some things I would like to see (would like to be able to pick black and white points when color balancing), but I can see it being real good for things that are in its realm right now. And I am still on the lower end of the learning curve with this since I am dipping my toes into it when I have a chance. I have a couple of projects coming up where I think it will be easier to get final results when compared to FCP 7 (after doing one project in FCP 7 and seeing how some people looked at things while editing and what they needed as output.)

I have been too busy struggling with CS5.5 to bother trying FCPX. But I have a $100 Apple voucher, so... The only things that may tempt me would be native editing of mts clips (in the case of PP, as I explained, I am not trying anymore, but even when I did, I still needed to rewrap the files with ClipWrap and then rename them as mpg files for some weird reason, to be able to play them smoothly within Bridge and PP) on MY machine. I strongly doubt FCPX is miraculously more efficient than PP to perform than on the same hardware.

Note: there is an update to PP (5.5.1) that apparently fixes some AVCHD playback issues on Macs. so I may come back with good new (or not).

Not sure which camera you are shooting on, and it may not work with the AVCHD you are shooting, but the one thing I have found is that it has been pretty good in handling my 5D footage in terms of playback and just being able to edit. There are options to import/convert on the fly and rendering is going on (if you want it to) but alot less obtrusive then dealing with FCP 7 and going through the steps to bring the footage in via ProRes. They also updated the Codecs the other day. Again, not sure if will do what you need, but give it a shot. I have even been playing on my MacBook Pro with it.

Here is Supported Camera List

I'm still laughing here :-)
Native AVCHD, HDV mts and Canon MOV's files all in the same timeline real time on a 2008 PC is no problems here lol
But you guys enjoy those Apples cause they look just great.

Hey Wags, working fine on my old laptop also. Oh, it is a Mac. You shooting the good 5D Mark II footage or the lower end 7D? Just asking

Bootcamp?
I don't use the 7D much, I use the 60D as it's prefect for video with its flip out screen.

Nah Bootcamp is too tough for me, all the running and pushups and stuff

How do you like the 60D? Played with it and it seemed real nice.

Well, that helps somewhat with playback of AVCHD (even edited) footage, but this is still too jerky at 1/4 resolution on my system to be called "playback". I think I will stick to transcoding first, then replacing the footage with the original AVCHD just before export.