Looking for other than Pinnacle Studio Pro 9
 

New to the forum and hope I placed this in the right area:

I have been using Studio Pro 9 for about 2 years now and am looking for a similar / better program. I enjoy the simple editing method, but the final DVD produced is terrible. I've never gotten the highlights in the menu to align correctly even though there was supposedly a patch fix I installed and the sound spikes at the beginning and end of each chapter if I use a fade-in and fade-out. I haven't had much time to try anything out let-alone get any editing done with my busy schedule. Please help, what do you recommend?

Thanks!

There are several other "entry level" programs similar to the Pinnacle Studio.
Adobe Premiere Elements is one of them. There is also a "light version" of Sony Vegas, and others which I don't remember the names of right now.
You should be able to download free trial versions of all of them from the manufacturers websites.

Vegas Movie Studio + DVD is Sony program.

Frankly, there is nothing out there as simple and easy as Studio. There will be learning curve with the others.

Ditto, what Chris B. said...
 

I moved from Studio 9 Plus to Adobe Production Suite, and soon came to realize that the amount of knowledge I lacked was staggering. It's why I participate in this forum. (Though I have to admit, I never encountered the problems with Studio 9 that you mention; though slow, I found it rather well behaved on my machine). My head is still spinning from all the differences. Despite that, I trudge ever onward, experimenting with something new nearly every day. If making mistakes is the best way to learn, I should soon be qualified for a degree of some kind, though I've certainly failed my share of "tests" along the way.

Good luck with whatever you choose.

I'm kind of in the same boat as you are. I started using Pinnacle around version 8.0 and have migrated to 9.0 & 10.0 (only because it came with something else). 10 doesn't support my analog capture in my new PC and I'm swapping the analog recorder for the new HV20 next month. It'll cost more for me to move to v10 that supports HDV, so I'm out looking at some of the other packages.

Right now I'm really enjoying the Sony Vegas trial and I'm inclined to move to that one (haven't decided yet between the $100 or $400 version though I know I can get away with just the $100 one ;). It's very straight forward yet offers a ton of features that just boggle my mind. Most things are very intuitive though there are a couple of minor things that you have to dig around for. It does a much better job at memory management than Pinnacle did and doesn't chew my machine to death when it's rendering. I still have to checkout the Adobe products before i commit to Vegas, but so far it's a very stable and functional app. I just had a few issues getting it running under Vista, but it seems very happy now.

-Steve