Looking for an objective answer or as close to objective as possible... Which NLE would better serve me and my interests?

I will primarily produce film-style, feature-length (80-100 minutes) entertainment productions using the Panasonic DVX100 camera on a PC. If I have done my research correctly, and with all due respect to Pinnacle, my choices are Premiere Pro, Vegas, or Avid software. I will probably be shooting in 24p with the camera and will author to dvd.

I studied video production at college, but not non-linear editing, altthough I am, I think, PC literate. Do all three editing programs utilize a timeline format in post-production? Maybe there's a link that addresses the feature-length question?

--Dale

Avid is the industry leader in feature editing. However, any of the products you mentioned can be used, Avid and it's media management is better suited to the requirements of editing features.

<<<-- Originally posted by Dale Nicholson : If I have done my research correctly, and with all due respect to Pinnacle, my choices are Premiere Pro, Vegas, or Avid software. I will probably be shooting in 24p with the camera and will author to dvd
--Dale -->>>

If you are wanting to process 24p natively and create 24p DVDs, I believe your only answer is Vegas+DVD until the other products start supporting 24p.

So Avid's software doesn't handle 24p natively? I didn't know that info. Thanks--

Dale

I'm not sure - ask someone who knows Avid well. But I was thinking that only Vegas handled all the various modes of 24p produced by that camera.

Avid supports 24p with the Panny. Go to www.avid.com for more info.

According to the Panasonic website, your NLE shouldn't matter.

http://www.panasonic.com/PBDS/subcat/dvproline/DVworld_24qs.html

Or am I misunderstanding the answer to question number 5 (provided below)?

5. Does shooting 24p with the AG-DVX100 mean I need new Non Linear Editing process?

No. This is because the AG-DVX100 camera has been specifically designed to work in an NTSC DV editing environment to minimize your necessary 24p investment. Any existing IEEE-1394 based NLE should be compatible with the live camera IEEE-1394 output and tapes recorded by the AG-DVX100.
A compatible IEEE-1394 based software editing application typically costs under $1,000 (computer hardware extra).You may also be able to add a specialized PCI bus hardware accelerator to your computer providing real time video transitions and effects. See the Resources section of this site for links.

The Panasonic AG-DVX100 is a new prosumer camcorder that, in addition to being able to shoot 60i and 30p video, can shoot 24 fps “film rate” progressive video. Since the DV format is not able to store 24 fps directly, the camera does pulldown on the fly and records 60i video to tape. Even before the 4.0b update, Vegas was able to edit this video; however, the editing was in 60i, so all titles, transitions, and effects were rendered at 60i and did not have the same frame cadence “look” as the video that had pulldown. More importantly, if the final video was going to be transferred to film, there were pulldown cadence breaks that needed to be dealt with by the transfer house with added expense. With the 4.0b update, Vegas is able to remove pulldown from the source media on the fly, edit in 24p, and reinsert pulldown when rendering to DV. This solves the cadence break issue, the title / transition / effects cadence issue, and has the added bonus of being able to render those elements 2.5 times faster! With native support for the Panasonic AG-DVX100 in Vegas 4.0b, you can shoot, capture, edit, and render 24p DV with no external conversion programs, and you can render 24p MPEG-2 for DVD delivery.

The Panasonic camera actually has two pulldown modes, standard 2-3 pulldown and what they call “Advanced” mode (24pA), which is 2-3-3-2 pulldown.


Do the others handle the various pulldown modes correctly? Or do they just edit in 60i?

Yup Avid edits the pulldown correctly. Outut for Mpeg2/dvd.