Workfl ow

The working environment for your clips

When using higher end editing tools, you tend to be dealing with a lot more clips and tools at once, and being able to focus is essential. Final Cut Pro X is fairly typically Apple in that it expects you to work the way it thinks you should, and while that's perfectly usable, it's not very flexible, as well as being based on an iMovie/iPhoto style Events system for your clips that you may not want on hand all the time. Lightworks takes the opposite approach, focusing on multiple ‘rooms’ that you can set up by dragging the floating windows around at will. Premiere Pro CC and Avid land in the middle, with dedicated Workspaces for tasks like Editing that shuffle everything around as necessary, while Premiere Elements focuses more on specific tasks with a one-click way of resetting. All of them are very usable, with at least some support for dual-monitor systems. Jahshaka is not pleasant to use, with a very clunky app that breaks its abilities into multiple rooms, but with none of the sleekness.