Having used the new build for a few hours to make a new movie of mixed content (pictures, AVCHD video, Standard Def Video), here are my observations:

The good:

1) Magic Motion is fixed
2) I did not experience any fatal program crashes on windows Vista 64
3) multi trim and trim worked much better. Before, the program would get hung and you would experience long delays. It is 80% better now (still a little bizarre behavior)
4) Moving content around the timeline is much faster
5) It seems like SVRT is done more to make sure that only content that needs to be re-rendered is re-rendered, but see below on the renderer.

The not so good:
1) AVCHD is still limited to 14800 kbps
2) The renderer is still the same as before. When I render AVCHD I still get some interlacing artifacts (even though my video is progressive!)
3) My workaround is this: I find that if I import my produced video into the latest version of Nero9 and re-render, a lot of artifacts are gone. Nero sucks for video editing for the most part, but I find its HD renderer excellent (although it has no GPU acceleration).
4) GPU acceleration runs (ie. it doesn't crash), but it creates a ton of artifacts (either its PD7 or ATI's fault, I have two ATI Radeon 4870 cards in crossfire on an i7 920 system with 12GB). If only I could get GPU acceleration to produce decent video, since with GPU acceleration is a 2x speedup for me over my quad core system alone).
5) The system does not take advantage of 64 bit operating systems, as I have 12GB of RAM, and when full rendering, PD7 takes up a max of only about 2.5-3.0GB. Also, it is supposed to be i7 core optimized, but I usually see only about 50-60% cpu utilization across the cores

So, in summary, the program is a ton more stable now, but still suffers some of the video quality issues from before.

I wonder when PD8 will be released?

Alex