I recently found myself in a jam with Ulead's Video Studio, a program I have been using for about 3 years and have regularly upgraded. It's always been a bit hit-and-miss, but I could manage to finish my movies with it. Until recently. For some reason it choked on a re-edit of a movie I did for a client over 2 years ago. I had reimported the clips as MPEG-2 files and simply added some new titles and a menu. Couldn't get it to burn without crashing VS. In a panic I downloaded the trial of PD6 and was pleasantly surprised that it handled this same video with nary a whimper. I had to create a clumsy 18 page menu (lots of chapters in this movie) because of limitations with the trial version, but I delivered the product on time. I was particularly impressed with the stability and speed, rendering took less than 50 minutesfor a 1hr12min movie. VS had been rendering over 3 hrs on the same project. Of course, I went out and bought the retail boxed version of the program ASAP ($69 from Amazon) .

I also recently bought a Canon HV-20 for an upcoming project for this same client. I've been playing around trying different things just to test the camera and PD's ability to handle HDV content. I'm not about to spend the money on an HD burner just yet because I need the widest compatibility for my output and few people I know have Blu-Ray players (including me), but after shooting, downloading and burning some HDV content onto a SD disc I am convinced I made the right choice as far as camera goes. The quality of the video even though downconverted from HDV to SD is far better than that of a regular camera. I know because I bought a Sony cam for evaluation. I returned it yesterday after a weekend of shooting and evaluating it with the Canon.

I was hesitant to go to HD because of all the horror stories I've read here and on the Ulead forum with downloading, editing and outputting HD content. Based on that education I decided to avoid the hard-drive and DVD format cameras (especially AVCHD) and stick with MiniDV. This limits one's choices, but for budget editing it is the way to go. PD6 handles this format with ease, although it doesn't like seing tapes with mixed formats (SD and HDV), I discovered. No problem, I won't do that anymore.

VS had trouble even recognizing this camera and crashes regularly. I think I've seen the last upgrade of that program. There are some things about it, though, that I would like to see in PD. For one, the ability to change the workspace view. VS has 4 different configurations of the workspace that change where elements like the preview window and library appear on the screen. I'd like to see some flexibility in PD for this. Menu creation in PD6 is far and away better than in VS, more intuitive and certainly more flexible. I would like to be able to create custom menu templates the way VS does with their photo editing software. I especially like that I can erase DVD+RW discs while in the burn module. I almost always output first to this format to avoid making anymore shiny coasters and this is a huge convenience. I've only been using the retail version for a few days, but I am very impressed with how robust and stable this program is at only version 6, especially when compared to VS, which is already at version 11. I'm so glad that PD kept me from going back to Pinnacle' Studio. That program was responsible for my premature hair loss.

One other big positive. PD works flawlessly with my TV tuner card. Not only can I capture from the tuner, but I can also capture from its RCA inputs. This means I can connect a VCR to simply convert VHS tapes to DVD. I could never get this to work properly with VS. I had to first dump the VHS tapes onto my MiniDV camcorder (my old Sharp cam has RCA in/out) and then download them to the computer. Not the best way, but the only way with VS. This alone makes PD worth the investment.