I have been a long time Pinnacle Studio user.
Unfortunately, the latest patch for Studio 10 does not appear to like me. Before reloading my windows box, it left me unable to use some of the functions of the program. After reloading Studio itself, it left me unable to use it, period, it crashed all the time. After reloading windows on a new, larger drive (for other reasons) and reloading Studio from scratch, the menu system is badly broken, basically hanging the program if I try to set up a menu (which is the whole effin point of my projects). In all of this, Pinnacle has shown themselves incompetent at providing support.
Next, I looked around at some of the Free options....and they're all STILL horrible science projects to get installed and all the various peices hooked together. They may well work fabulously once you get them there, but I found no straightforward "you just install it" solution there. I already have spent three days pretty solidly re-installing and verifying all my standard apps (firefox, trillian, quicken, etc), I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another three days trying to get one function (video editing) to work. And I don't think it's reasonable to move to a workflow where I have to run 3 or 4 different programs sequentially to do what Studio could do pretty seamlessly. When it was working.
So looking at other options, I tried out DVD-Lab and DVD-Lab pro....which don't appear (as far as I could tell trolling through the myriad menus and help system) to have any way to 1) zoom in on a section of video and 2) move frame by frame as opposed to i-Frame by i-Frame. In other words, no single frame advance/backup. This leaves me with insufficient precision to cut up my videos as I would like.
So now I'm at a loss where to turn next. Google is pointless, because you get a dozen copies of the same conversations about solving this or that, or companies selling video software with no indication of quality, etc. If any of y'all have recommendations for video editing/authoring software that is reasonably easy to install and well integrated, not to mention has zoom and frame-level editing capabilities, and can move easily between SVCD quality TiVo captures and DVD burning, I'm all ears. If it comes with a trial period, so much the better. I'm actually quite glad that DVD-Lab does have a trial period, or I'd have spent $100 or more on other people's recommendations that turned out to not fit my needs.
In the end I may try to find an archived copy of the last previous Studio patch, which always worked fine for me, but after the horrible support job Pinnacle has done (email support making outright ridiculous suggestions, and "live chat" support unwilling to spend more than a few minutes with me), I'd rather take my attention and money somewhere else. I say money, but of course $500 professional kit is not in my budget. DVD-Lab Pro was only an attempt to see if maybe it did what DVD-Lab standard did not, I doubt I could afford the $245 sticker price.
Let me know what you think....