Okay, I m answering my own questions. A site for free 30 day trial. Will look at HDV aspects tonight. Looks like I was misreading on the pricing issue.

Yes, as I said earlier, I can consider this option because there is an 'any NLE to Edius promotional upgrade' on offer at the moment. To me the cost is only £149.00. That's about $280.00. Unfortunately I just looked and the offer is not available in the US.

Michael:

Here is a simple edit done with Premiere Pro. Took 4 seconds of a track run, and slowed to 40% to make a 10 sec clip. Took about 45 seconds to render. About 33 mgbs:

http://www.makeyourfilm.net/downloads/slowrun.m2v

'Morning Chris.

Sorry, clip wouldn't play for some reason.

But I'm sure it's great. Anyway, this isn't about my NLE's better than your NLE - Premiere, Vegas FCP, Avid Liquid are all way more sophisticated as editing tools than Edius. But, with Canopus HQ beating at its heart, Edius has got to be a heavyweight HDV contender.

Michael, if you want to try Liquid, there is a free trial version at http://www.avid.com/forms/infoLiquid...LDVDTRYOUTQ106

But, with working with 1080i, Liquid wants a 256MB PCIe graphics card. Liquid heavily relies on the GPU for real-time playback and rendering. Liquid has handled native HDV format since version 6 without rendering it to a format the editor can handle. But, Liquid will work with a lesser video card. Performance will not be premium though.

I edit SD with a dual Xeon and a AGP ATI X800XT All-In-Wonder (256MB.) I have also created Ken Burns style slideshows in 720p using stills (using a CPU effect - talk about processor intensive!)

Edius Price
 

The price is actually $499 US and that includes a free upgrade when v4 comes out in June/July.

http://store.yahoo.com/yhst-58626189988044/edprso.html