I think it's a bit unfair to only include WriterDuet as a free program. Yes, they provide a fully functional free version if you are ok with staying online – but they also offer a desktop version, that has the cloud sync and collaboration features, but works perfectly fine offline and alone.

I use WriterDuet, but have never used it to collaborate. It is a fully featured, slick and modern screenwriting program on par with Fade In.

Looking forward to a deep dive into these by Curtis Judd. The price seems great, but there are a lot of quirks... 2.4ghz, internal battery and a questionable look-at-me color choice (on-body mics should make an attempt at discretion in my opinion...).

Yes, there is a confusing tone in the article.

" – and that even with ProRes RAW, you currently can't write to it with software (only with hardware)"

This seems to imply the wish to take an intermediate/video codec and turning it into a raw file – re-bayering the data? According to what algorithm and process, and, more importantly, to what end?

BM are only touting the genuinely useful – but not groundbreaking – fact that Davinci Resolve can trim your recorded BMRAW media to only the files you used in your edit (with handles if you want) without transcoding.

I don't think there is a use case where writing video (as opposed to sensor data) to raw makes much sense. I guess if you had some brutal, lossless raw data already – ArriRAW for instance – transcoding to BMRAW (after BM have profiled the Alexa sensor) might be useful to save space, but that's a bit of a fringe scenario...

Max, if you found precision lacking in FCPX, it seems clear to me that you just never got the hang of the Magnetic timeline, even if you used the program a fair bit. If you "always used the grey fill in clip on the first level" it's obvious that you just never got it, never learned why Apple went to the trouble of upending the entire program and angering an entire industry. As this documentary probably illustrates, you are (were) not alone.

And yes, indeed using FCPX as if it's a track based NLE is frustrating. It's a bit like refusing to learn how to drive a fork-lift because it turns with its back wheels – But I hope you realise some manoeuvres are only possible when you can turn on the spot, when the focus of your actions is on what you are moving around and not the shelves you are stacking (OK, that metaphor got stretched a bit...).

Personally I found that once I understood that nothing in FCPX is destructive, that everything just shifts and slides to accommodate your changes, I felt free. And I felt like everything was even more deliberate, more precise – that's after years of using FPC7.

This was a great article at the time – but that was 5 years ago! And they are talking about a lot technical stuff and a lot of specs. Theorising about the advent of the "new Mac Pro" (meaning the trash-can). Half the article is badly dated so it's a bit strange posting it on the front page...

Well first off, the industry standard is still AVID for feature films, both in Hollywood and elsewhere. Things might change, but currently it is what producers are familiar with, pipelines are constructed around and what makes everyone feel at ease at the top level.

As for the differences between the other programs, as I see it:

PREMIERE
PROS: Tons of features, integration with other Adobe programs, widely used, familiar to people who learned editing on AVID or old Final Cut.
CONS: Buggy and quirky, middling performance-to-hardware ratio, cluttered and constructed with a more-is-more mentality.

RESOLVE
PROS: Beautiful colour integration, good sound and vfx integration too, with rapid development by an ambitious developer. Plays well with most other programs, and smokes these other editors as a finishing tool. Free!
CONS: Rapid development means growing pains; bugs and design gaffes, very demanding on hardware (though that is improving), not widely used as an editor yet.

FINAL CUT PRO X
PROS: By far the biggest benefit to those who use it, is the altered paradigm – designed with a desire to change digital editing from the ground-up, from the organisation of data to the magnetic timeline, this is different. Those who like it LOVE it. It's also streamlined and sleek, and runs better than anything else on a Mac. Steady development and a mature and robust eco-system of plug-ins.
CONS: Strange blind-spots and missing features, sometimes things have been simplified to a fault (typical Apple). Requires expensive plug-ins to do basic things and bumpy integration into established vfx, color and especially audio pipelines. Hard adjustment for people raised on the previous paradigm.

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I myself have drunk the FCPX kool-aid, but use Resolve to finish my more high stakes one-man jobs. I have edited two feature films on FCPX now, and find the thought of going back to Premiere/AVID style editing simply depressing.