Michael Towe: Camera operator, editor and producer in San Diego, California.

I've been years on Final Cut up to 7, which I still use primarily, especially on projects where it will need to be sent out for color correction, sound mixing, etc. I have recently done a couple of projects in FCPX and had a fairly pleasant experience with it. I would recommend it only for projects where you are going to be finishing and delivering yourself as it still has some input/output issues (though third party products are fixing a lot of that). Given your experience with FCE, there might be a lot of familiar aspects to it that could be helpful. Regardless of what you decide, I would definitely check out lynda.com for a tutorial. You can get a basic rundown of any of these programs relatively inexpensively. They each do the same things very differently sometimes (and often have multiple ways of doing the same thing) and a basic rundown can save a lot of frustration. A new editing program can be intimidating, so having the knowledge of where things are and what they do can be huge. Good luck!

Not an editor, but as a director and producer, I will say that sitting in on the editing process AVID is the industry standard, and Adobe is a very close second... and both are much more user friendly than Final Cut, in any incarnation.

Robert - What type of work do you mostly edit? If you are doing mostly scripted feature, or documentary work, that is not motion graphics heavy I would go in the Avid direction. For just straight cutting I don't think it can be beat. If you are doing more corporate type work or commercials that require a lot of After Effects then Premier would be the best choice. This due to it's integration with After Effects which is quite amazing. Finally where the learning curve is concerned you will find it easier to transfer your FCP knowledge over to Premier CS6, it is very similar to FCP Classic. Good luck making the move, many of us are in the same boat, Mike

I am working on FC Studio Six... I love six. This may be the end of FCP for me if they don't re-enstate Soundtrack Pro and Color...

I am still working in FCP 7 and deciding whether to move back to Avid or move to Premier, at this point I am leaning to Avid. I have experimented with FCP X but decided it is not quite ready for primetime yet. I tried to run my last large corporate project through it and it just didn't hold up. I can say that I loved the keyword process of organizing footage. Very powerful and I wish I had this in Avid. On the minus side I hate the way that audio is handled in X. Additionally the inability to cut and paste selected effect from one clip to another really killed it for me. With effect copy and paste being an all or nothing thing it becomes unusable.

hi my mom has written several books. many people love them and say they should become movies! she puts a lot of detales to make you see what she writes. Ov course she wont let me read them. i just see and hear people raid about them. Since the books are already writen it should be easy to make a script out of them right? her pen name is Kerrigan Rhea