Moving from iMovie to Final Cut Pro

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Great article, Iain, as usual. I often shoot TV commercials and interviews with my iPhone, rough cut in iMovie while I'm on the road that day, then move to FCP for finalizing it when back in the studio. Also I love LenoFX, SVM, FCPX Full Access, Ryan Nagle, PremiumVFX, and Coremelt's VFX Market as some places to get great templates at super reasonable, affordable prices. Yeah, the "expensive" plugin/template companies need to rethink what they're doing, IMHO. Great article, Iain. Thank you!

That's a good reason to move from FCP. I moved from imovie as well.

I'm making this transition too, but with some questions. I'm using a late 2014 imac with 16 GB, 1 TB HDD & a thunderbolt 2. I plan to use this machine and get an external 2 TB drive. Do I need a SSD or will a HDD work? Will the SSD improve speed? The big advantage as I see is that the SSD will transfer to an upgrade.

Go SSD and don't look back. I believe that comes with a 5400rpm which is truly a performance pig when it comes to editing significant video. In earlier times we'd get 10,000 rpm spinners for cutting video but they were pricey and these days beat handsomely by todays SSDs.

If you have any doubts buy an SSD. Carbon Copy Clone your existing drive to it and boot off it from a USB port. It should still launch quicker off the restricted USB than the 5400 does connected to the main board.

Thanks VG . Unfortunately, I bought hd before reading your reply. I formatted the drive as "Mac extended, journaled." I have since completed a small project . At the export I was unable to find the recommended "master file' option; consequently, I transferred the files and reformatted as APFS. Upon export there was still no "master file option." I selected an alternate choice that produced a .mov file that looked fine. I would however like to resolve the issue of not having the "master file'" option. Any suggestions?