You'll find that currently both Edius and PP handle various camera-codec/formats with much greater ease and speed than FCP does.

And it's a cryin' shame that there's no native OS X version of Edius; I have v5.5 and it's absolutely the fastest, easiest, "it just works" NLE - even faster than M100 - that I've used to date. That may change as I'm about to review Avid v.5 but from what I've heard Avid has also gotten a huge core-codec handling revamp and promises to be a speed-demon as well.

My hope is that Apple will allow FCP's next version to get away from all this transcoding into ProRes nonsense and just give it the drag-n-drop functionality that the other NLE's enjoy.

And to anyone who hans't tried it, Edius is one of the most under-rated, least marketed and fastest NLE on the planet. It's a good thing Grass Valley took it over from Canopus but it's still relatively an unknown in the indie market. Ask the Mac-NLE community about it and more than half will say they've never heard of it.

Soon I'll have a head-to-head comparo of PP CS5, Edius 5.5, & Avid v.5, not for the "which is better" endless debate but more of a "what's new" update to all these venerable packages. I'm still waiting for my Avid copy to show up to start the review process.

(Ain't it interesting that Avid, PP and Edius are *all* on version "5"? Coincidence or sneaky marketing ploy? Hmm...)

If I may ask, exactly what professions are some of you folks involved in? I only ask because it seems like this thread has a good collection of professionals, and Im interested.