Jiri, thanks for the heads-up on Edius Neo. I've downloaded Edius Pro and will give it a spin this weekend. Found a NewTek retailer not too far away and will try SpeedEdit too, hopefully next week.

I used to edit deck to deck with an Amiga, a NewTek Toaster card and an RGB deck controller, way back in the old days. I have a fondness for NewTek and a respect for how much they changed the industry back then. So I'll approach Speed Edit with a pretty positive frame of mind and that might help me get over its' strangeness.

Thanks for all of your replies and help.

I love Edius for its stability, speed, and ease of use. The Canopus HQ codec really rocks!

I while back the producer of the show I edit came to me and asked me to compile a short clip (3-5 minutes) out of some of our shows - we had about 25 or 30 back then - all one full hour shows. Imagine what would have cost me timewise importing 25 hours of DV video into Adobe Premiere with all the conforming... In Edius it took me about 15 minutes to import 25 clips and cut up the clip. And the nice thing is, if you already know Premiere, it's very easy to go over, as Edius has a very similar editing approach.

I miss the audio integration with Audition though (the audio tool in Edius are kind of weak)... but learning to work around it.

Had problems getting the Edius Pro 4 trial version going, but it might be that I mis-labeled the folder "DLFiles " instead of "DLfiles", no cap on the F. Anyway, will re-install and give it a try. My budget a year ago forced me to buy the Macbook as opposed to the MacbookPro with a seperate graphics card and I'm paying for it now.

Also looking to see if I can budget a cheap Quad Core PC with decent graphics card. Looking to be about $1,200 plus for anything workable.