I just did a try of the trial version and have these initial observations so far – your results may vary.

Input files for me are all mpg or wtv files, 480, 720 or 1080.

Hardware acceleration box – PD9 often had serious problems with this box checked, while PD10 seems to do better with this box checked. (For me the PD10 sweet spot is the hardware acceleration box checked (bottom box), and the upper box (open CL or its equivalent with the intel GPU) unchecked.)

Producing 720p mpg or avc material – both PD9 and PD10 have brightness pulsing about once a second in the produced video if the hardware acceleration box is not checked. This is true whether the system has an nvidia card, or if the card is removed and PD10 is run with the Intel Quicksync acceleration. This pulsing occurs uniformly across the screen, and in photography terms, looks like maybe an f-stop or two of brightness difference. A key difference is that PD10 seems to do well overall with the hardware accel box checked, while PD9 did not. Default and custom profiles were tried.

Producing 480 mpg or avc material – PD9 created jaggies and interlace artifacts in EVERY option I could try. PD10 will do pretty good if ONLY the default profiles are chosen. ANY custom profile I have tried results in visible jaggies and interlace artifacts (even with the same or higher bit rates). Again this occurs whether the nvidia card is installed, or is removed and run with the HD3000 GPU on the intel chip.

Timeline scrolling and editing responsiveness – PD10 is decent, but not great. Every so often the timeline will ‘freeze’ for 5-10 seconds. But at least there is no crashing or minutes long lockups like early versions of PD9.

WTV file conversion – PD9 had serious problems with converting 720p WTV files, such that at scene changes it looked like the conversion process was bit rate limited – the visible effect was very noticeable blockiness for several seconds immediately after scene changes. PD10 does much better at this. However, WTV 720p files converted by PD10 STILL have the gradually increasing audio sync offset problem that has existed at least since PD8.

SVRT seems to work better. For instance with PD9 and 480 content that could be produced with SVRT, most of the content would be non-rendered and undamaged, but edit points would kick in the renderer and then jaggies and such would appear. It was very visible in the finished product, as the image quality would suddenly get ‘worse’ for a few seconds and then get ‘better’. As long as the default 480 profiles are chosen in PD10, the output quality is consistent.

3D functionality – don’t care, not tried.

In summary, at least PD10 ‘out of the box’ has not crashed, frozen, or caused significant video quality degradation like my particular experience with PD9 – with one caveat: you still have to figure out the ‘sweet spot’ of checked boxes and profiles within PD10 for your particular machine to attain that performance. I can understand that speed or efficiency would change with which box is checked, but it is frustrating that video quality is also significantly and visibly degraded.

W7 64bit, Intel I7 2600; 8Gb RAM, Nvidia 470, SSD boot drive with 50+ gig free, large mag drive for videos, up to the minute video drivers