I was using Pinnacle Studio 9, after have tried many other (Sonic, Ulead etc.).

Great functions, but very "heavy", slow and sometimes highly unstable...

And then... i tried WinDVD from InterVideo (last week, actually).

www.intervideo.com

What an improvement !

I was impressed by the speed of the rendering (he has the "smart rendering" function). The Authoring part is complete (menu, background, buttons etc.).

Some critics : less "visual effects" than Studio 9. And impossible to change the level of sound and music track in a dynamic way (you set the levels of each track for once, for the whole clip).

Less options also for "text" titles.

He has also less options for rendering (Studio can create for instance a RealPlayer Stream file from your movie etc.)

But one in one, I gained a lot in speed of work.

Oh last good point : WinDVD can "read" on the fly the video files ".MOD" (which is actually MPEG2) created by the digital camera JVC GZ 500 ! Before, I needed to make a conversion with some tools, before to import the clips into Studio 9....

Voila. I just wanted to share with u my enthousiasm.

;-)

If you have the chance, another you may want to play with is Adobe's Premiere Elements. Its a stripped down, uncomplicated version of their highly rated Premiere video editing software. (Similar to Photoshop Elements vs. Photoshop)

cheers