What would Tom Wolsky do??

Question

...would he upgrade from FCE3.5 to FCE4 ??? Why would he?? Would he give up Soundtrack? or use both 3.5 and 4?? What if he doesn't have nor need AVCHD-would he still upgrade to FCE 4?? Are the new features in FCE 4 enough impetus for him to switch? What does he know about FCE 4 that we do not yet know?
....only one person knows the answers to these and I'm sure, more questions to come...stay tuned...hopefully...

Answer 1

Tom is very knowledgeable and deserves a great deal of respect for his teaching skills.
The issue of this new product release, however, is unrelated to that, and enters the realm of marketing.
Personally, I feel very abandoned by Apple with what they have done in this version. I made the leap to the Mac platform last May with the release of the Adobe CS3 Suite. I had wanted to do it for years based on the amount of work I do in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. However, I had been doing desktop video production using Adobe Premiere/proprietary software, and realtime hardware support in Windows since 1995 and could not leave that based on the amount I had invested. For the last few years, however, I have been dying to switch to Final Cut, and saw an affordable opportunity to try it in FCE.
All in all, it has been frustrating, switching platforms and nonlinear applications at the same time. I find FCE a lot different than Premiere/hardware support, for instance. But after the last three productions I did under pressure, I learned tons, with Tom's kind help, and have learned to love it. I mean REALLY love it. Especially the quality of Quick Time, which I feel surpasses the Canopus codec, which I have used for years and is supposedly one of the best on the Windows platform.
I know I've taken a long time to get here, but now here's the reason I'm disappointed -- I think Apple has effectively redirected a respected semi-professional (prosumer) product toward the consumer market by removing Soundtrack (sound being of major importance to serious film and videomakers). All to save a hundred bucks.
And I'm sorry guys, but Garage Band just doesn't do it. Garage band is still codependent with ITunes, which has the sole purpose of making money for Apple by selling songs at 99 cents each. I'm not being critical, because that's a great service and my family and I use it, but I don't want it running my video production applications.
I own and use buy-out music libraries and sound effects, musical and vocal performances that I record and of which I own the copyright, and numerous other types of audio files. I do not at any time want ITunes or Garage Band taking control of or in any other way messing around with my audio in my computer. Which it still tries to do regularly, despite the fact that I change the default settings on audio files.
For editing I use Bias Peak, and for complex mixes and processing I have been using Soundtrack.
It now looks like I am going to have two choices: upgrade to Final Cut Pro or go back to Premiere. Fortunately or not, Adobe has just introduced a Premiere Mac version. If I go to Premiere, I still won't have a decent audio application, so I'll have to take it to a PC for processing in Adobe Audition, or install Windows in my Mac and run Audition there. Not a simple world, is it?
Suffice it to say that I am very disappointed with what Apple has done with the sound in FCE.