I finally made the leap this weekend and decided to move away from Final Cut 7 to Adobe Premiere, Creative Cloud.
James Tauber introduced me to digital non-linear editing via a program called Sony Vegas back in 2005. I'd never done any editing up to that point but was astounded by how easy it was to learn Vegas. I remember being productive with it within an hour.
I went kicking and screaming to Apple and Final cut in 2009 but never looked back once I was up to speed. While the learning curve was much steeper with Final Cut 7, learning it really paid off in a number of areas and the power of the Final Cut workflow became almost immediately apparent. The thing that I really didn't like about it though, was the need to transcode everything to ProRes before you could import it into the timeline.
Sony Vegas didn't require source media transcoding - it would take literally anything and allow you to drop it directly into a timeline and start cutting.
The move to Premiere so far has been extremely quick. I was not only able to set my layout up to almost exactly mirror my final cut layout, but all of my keyboard shortcuts work the same.
Moving projects from FCP required just a simple XML export. Everything came in just fine, and I was cutting within 10 minutes.
The cool thing about premiere is not only do all my FCP skills translate directly, but I no longer have to transcode source material to ProRes first; I can drop media into the timeline directly, as is.
Loving it so far..