The new Final Cut Pro X was announces tonight and I hit the twitter-verse. People were buzzing about the price point, the features and some were worried about their professional future.

I think it is important to remember the past and not drink too much of the "Kool-aid". Yeah the features are great and they might keep things in sync for you and import natively from your DSL camera directly... Yeah, it's too be expected. Computers are suppose to do the robot work.

But I don't think jobs (Editor and/or Assistant Editor Jobs) are in trouble.

I think the easy access might yes create some people who think that now they are "editors" because they know software but most in the industry are use to weeding out those folks. And with the coming of the digital age of filmmaking (1998-present) we lost a few transfer House techs but gainned onset media managers. Jobs die and new ones pop up, c'est la vie.

Moreover, I am presently working on a project that has 2 assistants, 2 editors and even the director is doing some touching up. Thus, the assistants must keep 4-5 sets of drives organized. This makes me believe that filmmakers will just use more cameras requiring more man power to keep up with more ambitious projects. I remember a time where documentary shooting ratio was 4:1, now it's more like 40:1; the cameras are rolling.

Most importantly let's not forget that the computers have not taken over yet. They won't work flawlessly like in a demo in a controlled environment. They will be glitches, fixes and most importantly people who will push the software to it's limits requiring some creative troubleshooting from an ace assistant.