I edit fine on FCP but dont like tripping in to Color - and think Colour is backwards !
Id like an editor like FCP and do my colour in a Lightroom style interface..
It partly depends on price point.
Lightroom is still very basic. But Adobe has all of the tools available to enable the same functionality as Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Media Encoder, etc. in Lightroom at $99. If they really want to compete at that price point, it could be killer. Big TBD for future releases and how quickly they appear.
I would assume they might be afraid of undercutting their other, more expensive, aps? Depends on how much the market pushes them to perform (can you say - Canon?)
Next up is Photoshop CS 6.0 Standard and whatever they call Extended now. Premium? See Billy's thread in this forum for some preliminary info.
Finally, if you can pop for Adobe CS 6.0 Production Premium, you get it all - Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, Speed Grade (which they recentlty acquired and will likely intergrate more thouroughly in 6.xx releases - hopefully to Photoshop, etc. too - maybe Lightroom?
Production Premium is a huge, new suite with a new interface that looks like it will be kick ass. The cheapest direct purchase is educational, at $429 (or less.) You can later upgrade that to a full, commercial liscense at the CS 6.5 or CS 7.0 release, via a normal upgrade (about $399 this go round.)
It has interfaces to mimic Final Cut Pro, Avid, etc. It can import existing projects from them and export projects to them. It looks like Adobe is making a serious play in that market.
You might be able to upgrade from suites as old as CS 2, if you buy CS 5.5 before May 6, and then get your free (automatic) upgrade to CS 6.0. After May 6 you can no longer upgrade from CS 2, but you can upgrade CS 3, 4, 5, and 5.5 directly to 6.0 (Either from a suite, or from some stand-alone products.)
So you have basically 3 new tools from Adobe, at price points from $99 (for Lightroom 4.0 at B&H with a camera or lens purchase, or at Adobe with other software), to whatever a Photoshop upgrade costs you - maybe $200 to $399 - to $429 to $1,699 for Production Premium.
Those use 3 different editing paradigms, although all 3 are non-destructive (which seems to be where everyone is going.)
There is:
1) The
Lightroom interface,
2) A traditional
Layers and Filters approach in Photoshop, applied to video, and
3)
Primiere Pro, with a non-destructive, meta-data based approach, with no transcoding, to a
more traditional NLE color grading & effects toolset with several stand-alone componenmts (After Effects, PhotoShop) Those can now exchange edits almost completely without rendering or "outputting," and baking in edits, when going from one tool to the next (via enhanced "smart object"-type links. Dynamic links? )
There is a lot to learn. It is hard to even figure out pricing and hardware architectures/requirements for each (Mercury engine, GPU, Cuda cores, RAM, HDD's).
I will have all 3 with the 6.0 release. I plan on spending the next 2 months doing a deep dive into each, with the real focus on Production Premium (Premiere, et. al.) I am obviously making a big commitment to that platform and so will be bised in that direction. But there are many other tools out there, new and old, low end and high end.
Billy and I have been exploring a bit and learning as we go. Lightroom is just too basic for much real work yet. I hope that Adobe enables all of their other tools through the LR interface soon, in release 4.1, 4.2, etc. (after the CS 6.0 launch.) It could be steller.
Photoshop looks pretty robust for those familiar with that workflow. There is a link in Billy's thread to a 7 minute video on PS 6.0 (available until May 6 as a free Beta, then as a 30 day trial.)
Good luck! We have been chatting and trying to learn day-by-day as these tools start to come out. Glad to have many others opinions in the mix!
Best,
Michael