Thanks Guys for your help.

Good to know you're just up the road Bill.

Looks though, I'll have to upgrade to Vista sometime then.

cheers,

Steve.

Vegas is nice, but try editing anything HDV longer than 10 minutes or 30 M2T files and it crashes... at least for me. I have 7e on Vista with 2GHz Core2 4MB cache, 2GB Ram.

Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum was released this week and now supports HDV scene splitting. More over, as long as you DON'T use Vista, regarding the slow preview issue, you can edit the "settings/video" and change the "dynamic RAM" to at least 400 MBs. Make sure you have at least 1 GB of RAM to do that though.

Vegas Video & like
 

I'd simply use Vegas Video and the lower end counterpart to start with - excellent manual, does the job, stable, and works extremely well for me.

You can go with alternative like Premiere Elements, too, but do expect to know that all of these programs require a little bit of learning (best taken care of by any of those books that show you in big photos step-by-step how to do things).

That said, I found VV to be the only program I could pick up right away w/o reading the manual, so it was the easiest program for me to learn years ago.

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Many years later, still making great videos using VV, so no problems here.

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as for scene splitting, I tend never to use this feature because all it does is to create dozens or hundreds of tiny files I have to import and work with. Far easier for me to import it as one big file, then use VV to split the video up where I want and all -- very easy to do. That way, it's physically still one big file even though it's been cut up into many individual files on the timeline.

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ULEAD Video Studio 11+
 

FYI - I've decided to use VS11+ to capture HDV footage (over HDVSplit) mainly becuase the files it creates are MPEG-ProgramStream not MPEG-TransportSream - and for me this means:

+'ve : PS is good for me I keep everything on an HTPC and many codecs like PS better than TS and I can use smart encoding to avoid the time / transcoding effort on converting to PS.

-'ve : No Time/Date stamp so no "Split by Scene" during capture. You can use "Split by Scene - based on content" and this is OK but takes another real time pass.

Thanks
Nathan