Transferring Projects to Professional Broadcast Systems

I am a writer/producer of on-air video promotions, formerly on staff with a national cable TV network at Turner Broadcasting, and now freelance.

I have never operated edit myself before, and am learning FCP X to work towars becoming a preditor. My hope was to do what would be refferred to as the offline edit (perhaps mostly in the past now that the gap between offline and online has mostly closed) on FCP X, and transfer the project to any of various high end edit suite systems at edit houses.

I am having a hard time getting a handle on if this is practicle/workable, given the many issues I've seen written about regarding compatability. In my experience, if you had an EDL and OMF and the media (tape for most of my career thus far,) you were good to go. Now, I just don't know what to think. I've surfed for information and found various threads addressing this or that individual compatability issue, and I find it hard to reach a conclusion on whether this will be possible with FCP X or if I really should consider investing the time and money in an Adobe or AVID system.

Of course I have asked my editor connections about this, and the answers seem to fall into two categories: those who think FCP X is inadequte for professional broadcast use period and likely to remain so for a long time, and those few who are highly faithful Mac users who are still using FCP 7 because of X's shortcomings, but optimistic that Apple will resolve enough of the issues such that may soon be acceptable for pre-post edits, and maybe even for posting within this year.

I realize my thread title may be provocative to some. I am a newbie who wants to believe in FCP X is a professional system for what I need in one now (and hopefully one that can accomodate growth in the future.) I hope to hear from those who think FCP is now or will soon be usable for professional broadcast. I like the software and would like feel good in commiting to it and not have to learn AVID or Premier in order to be able to do my own offline edits without monster headaches trying to take them to post houses. But I would also like to hear why some believe it is not suited for this use, and why.

I understand that this subect has probably been covered at length. Yet in my searches I cannot find any discussion threads or web pages that I find convincing one way or another. What I find is many debates on a level of technical matters that is far beyond my comprehension. I guess I need it dumbed down. Maybe success or failure stories of people working on this level might be persuasive. I know from experience compatability issues crop up with all systems. And I'll have strong tech support with editors from the houses, but they will generally not be able to come to my house to troubleshoot for exporting problems, so I'll need a workable procedure for getting things out of my Mac.

Any links to discussion threads or web sites is welcome. Thanks to any and all who are reading this and responding.

Peace,

Hep B.