Got home last Friday and started PD8 on my Vista platform. As expected, a popup came up, saying there is a patch available. No sooner have I selected <OK>, PD8 crashed. I restarted the program and no pop-up anymore, so I manually went to <Upgrade> and tried to download and run the patch. When I ran the PD after the installation had completed, the soft went unstable and kept on filling my screen with errors.
I was prepared, I had the actual full version of PD 8.0 build 2508 (as well as Service Pack) preliminary downloaded from CyberlLnk. I did have to uninstall the previous built 2220C and replace it with 2508. All went smooth.
I finished my very first project on Sunday; an 11 min video with tons of music, transitions, effects, titles. I think it was my first most complicated project to-date. PD8.0 has not crashed once during the editing. The only thing I noticed was it considerably slowed down at the very end of the project, to a point, I could not work with transitions anymore as playback had jerky video and mismatched audio. I solved the problem by dumping that entire memory overload by restarting PD and my project.
I found one bug in this new build. It is in Smart Music. Every time you try to preview a song and when click <Stop>, the pointer in the timeline goes all the way to the beginning of the project. Quite annoying.
I quite loved the feature of Smart Music. It smoothly stretches sound track to any length of the video you are trying to match. One question. If you want to <Purchase> additional tracks, can you only buy one single track at a time or the whole package? I tried to find out and came to realize that there are three options:
1. Home quality – 22k
2. Pro quality – 44k
3. The whole - CD.
Are 1 and 2 – prices per track? Is 3 a CD with all the library of songs that are visible in the Smart Music library drop down list for every track category? What if I do not want a CD and would like a download version?
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.