I finished the first edit of The Last Drug, with which I was totally content, at new years eve! It must have been some kind of subconscious psychological thing, telling myself to get it done in 2007, and it worked. Here are a few facts: including the credits the movie will be about 80 minutes. I would love it to be a bit longer, but the story was told and we learned from our first movie to don't get to much in love with the pictures instead. The movie counts about 1.500 cuts. Spun, a drug movie from Jonas Akerlund, is famous for it's 5.000 cuts, by the way. There are a few single-shot movies as well; the first one I know was Hitchcocks Rope. The regular number of cuts is said to be around 700, whatever that means.
My editing workstation was a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM and 2.5TB on a few SATA, IDE, Firewire 400 und USB2-harddisks, with two 1680x1050 TFTs. Nothing unusual.

The tool was Adobe Premiere CS2. Route 66 was edited on Avid Express DV, but Avid had no 720p25 support at the time I started editing (can you believe this?), so I had to switch. Which turned out to be a good choice; all in all I was comfortable with Premiere - I would use it again. Final Cut was no choice, since I was never into Macintosh. I tested Cinelerra on Mandriva-Linux, but the gross interface turned me off all the time (don't underestimate the importance of look and feel, especially in creative fields) and Cinelerra is said to perform not too good - which would, amongst the open source development style of it, be the number two reason for me to use it. Can someone validate this rumor?
Unfortunately we had no energy left, to concentrate on the editing tool, since this is our first feature film project. I hope we can collaborate with the Cinelerra community on our next movie to maybe improve the interface a bit.

My workspace in Adobe Premiere was looking like this:


The handling was better than with Avid (which is a matter of taste and for some editors almost a religious decision). The import of footage, pictures and audio was way better: more flexible with different codecs and space saving, since Premiere can work with different codecs, whereas Avid always creates a copy in its own format. And finally, compared to Avid Express DV, the functional range is broadly bigger.
Premiere is worse in terms of performance and stability: at the end of the project I had about three to five crashes per session, mostly when it had to handle different codecs at a time. I had to split the movie project into four smaller projects to be able to handle it at all. I used up to 6 video and 9 audio tracks, usually one to two video tracks and three to four audio tracks.
All voice-, effect- und music tracks have been separated, to make sure every single sample can still be edited independently by our sound designers Tom and Philipp, when I deliver the final audio tracks. That's the timeline, by the way:


I'm waiting for the feedback of our crew right now, to adjust the final cut and prepare the project for the next phase: compositing and sound design.