My first post on this forum and it's probably a contentious one so it could be my last!
Although it is not my intention to do so, I'm sure that I will upset many Final Cut Pro users in stating that, in my opinion, FCP has long passed it's 'sell by' date'; this also applies to the latest incarnation of Mac's OS and FCP software just released.
Three years ago I moved from PC to Mac, believing all the high praise for FCP must, to some extent, be justified; what a mistake!!!! Perhaps things are different if you are editing SD, but FCP flounders with poor transition and FX preview performance and long rendering times; when compared to editing the same footage, with the same FX and on the same MacPro, Edius is far more efficient and refined. This is particularly evident with full 1920x1080 50i EX HD footage; for example a 30 minute timeline that had already been rendered, but now subject an additional Y curve filter took over 2 hours to render in FCP compared to the 15 minutes in Edius; this was using FCP's ProRes and Edius's HQ formats with both rendered to their respective software formats to provide identical quality output. The so called 'real time' preview in FCP is a joke, it's often neither real time or of a quality that enables you to make a meaningful judgement of what is happening unless you render and this can take quite some time.
This assessment has been made using a 2.66GHz Quad core based MacPro fitted with 8GB RAM and 2 x 500GB SATA disk in RAID 0 for FCP and a single 500GB HD for Edius operating within the Windows environment under Bootcamp. More recent and Faster MacPros will show some improvement in speed, but I would expect the performces difference to remain similar.
In fairness, the FCP suite does have more extensive audio editing and advanced color correcting capabilities than Edius, but even the associated Soundtrack Pro program can be troublesome.
As far as stability is concerned, I have found Edius to be at least as stable as FCP and these days I don't have problems with Windows' stability either.
I would suggest that you visit Apples FCP forum to see the huge number of postings regarding problems then have a look at Grass Valley's Edius forum
I have also recently looked at Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and that seems to offer a better performance than FCP, but I have not yet had sufficient experience with this incarnation of PP to reach a conclusion as to how it really performs when used under pressure.
Just in case any of you may be wondering if my Operating Systems, FCP and Edius software is up to date, yes it is apart from the fact that I have not yet installed the just released Snow Leopard OS and FCP3 software, but all reports on these versions of the Mac software are indicating no real advancement in either real time or rendering performance.
Having recently installed Edius 5.12 on a new PC fitted with an Intel i7, 3.02GHz processor, 6GB of RAM and two 1TB HD drives in RAID 0 , I can only say that 1920x1080 editing is very close to the level of performance as SD DV was when I moved up to HD 4 years ago. The addtion of a FireCoder Blue card has given me better than real time rendering for BluRay (the Matrox MX02 mini with the Fast option does the same for FCP) and I am now able to burn a BluRay disk directly from the Edius timeline.
So, in conclusion, my appolgies if I have offended any FCP user, but don't forget that I too spent a lot of money on the FCP software!
Happy editing,
Geoff