I have 38 years experience in editing, mainly docs, for UK TV. I started on film (Steenbecks, Moviolas & Pic Syncs), in the 80s I trained on tape systems of various sorts (yuch spit!) and in ’93 heard about and trained on Avid. I was a complete convert from the start. Here was a system with the (admittedly few) advantages of tape cutting ( i.e. the ability to keep your old cuts for ref or re-use) and the simplicity and accuracy of film cutting, plus fx and a whole host of logging and filing possibilities. In the late nineties I also cut a few things on Lightworks and Heavyworks. Yeah it was not a bad system but it would crash 4 times a day and lose all your galleries and the stupid Steenbeck handle gave me an RSI but at least like Avid it was designed around editors and the way they work and think.

When I came to learn FCP I had no qualms, after all when I learned Lightworks I had a Friday afternoon run through with one of the edit assistants, took the manual home for the weekend, went in Monday morning and cut a one hour documentary on the Paddington rail disaster for Channel 5. I reasoned that all these edit systems are designed for editors, along the same lines of logic and therefore would provide the same tools. But not so with FCP. Stupid things like the difficulty in cutting a section from a old seq into the current seq and the apparent inability the hear audio when trimming frame by frame demonstrate that Apple either didn’t do their homework or felt they could get away with it by marketing it as the hip system that works like, say, photoshop with similar general software tools that would appeal to software geeks rather than editors. Perhaps there was a copyright issue, after all Avid was originally a Mac based system, but they lost out because they couldn’t produce a stable platform. Oh the joys of spending the 1st hour of each day repeatedly try to boot up before the Mac would grind into life. Windows XP may have made the interface a little duller but at least it was stable. Anyhow, copyright didn’t stop Lightworks from producing a usable system.

The difficulty we now have is that if we try to point this out to Exec producers as a reason to stick with Avid then we risk appearing Luddite and unwilling to accept change. The basic truth is that editing is about story telling and Avid is a far better story telling tool than FCP.

Anyway back to wrestling with FCP. Happy trails

The temptation is always to use the selection tool to drag things, but it really has to be roll, or ripple selection, but why when you increment with this tool using the keyboard do you not see the 2 frame display? You only seem to get this when you drag. The trim window is hard to use when there are multiple selections and either shows the wrong watch point or doesn’t display vision at all. Any tips to get round these shortcomings, as otherwise I think its a fab product? I’ve really tried to keep an open mind and forget about Avid, but really struggling here.

For those who don’t know, you move the watch point with a single click on an *existing* transition. (If you click on a transition that isn’t part of your trim you’ll move the blue bar and also create a roller.)

Also, in response to an early comment here — you can restore previous trim in an Avid. Hold down the option key and select trim mode. Rollers come back, as well as the trim counters.

To super impose one image over another in Xpress Pro you drop an effect from the effect pallet onto your top or second video track. Use the Superimpose effect from I think the first set of effects. Then open the effect editor window where you can adjust the opacity level. You can key frame it’s level so that you can start from 0 and ramp it up over time to any level including full 100%. Experiment with it for different effects.

Hope this works out for you.