I started a conversation on this in a different thread on DVD formats and thought I would move it to it's own since it's off-topic. Per the rather unscientific comparison below I'd be interested in other users' experiences about the two packages (I'm trying to decide which to buy) in particular what users of Pinnacle Studio V8 think of the SVCD MPEG rendering (since it's disabled in the trial version - Doh! Bad move by Pinnacle - do they have something to hide?)

Posting follows ...

I installed a trial of Pinnacle 8 last night and here are my initial thoughts vs Ulead 7 (also eval version):

Pinnacle 8 is easier to use but has less flexibility: There are fewer image filters that can be applied to the video, but the really important ones (bright/contrast, colour) are all there.

The subjective performance while editing seems better, and the ability to do all the edits with only preview quality DV then auto-load the bits you want to use when rendering is _very_ helpful (actually I used that in Pinnacle V7 but didn't check it in V8) BUT the one thing that I wanted to test: quality of SVCD output, is disabled on the eval version! The MPEG quality on Pinnacle V7 was far worse than Ulead or TMPGENC, so I wanted to see if V8 is any better.

Ulead V7 has much more flexibility but feels clunkier to use. More features (filters with key points and so forth) and transitions are nice if you spend the time to get to know them and the SVCD output quality is good. The main niggles I have are:

Video filters and transitions don't apply to titles, only the video stream itself. This can be annoying if you want to use a transition to wipe a title from the slide (for example at the end of a film).

Titles don't stay attached to their video clips, so if you create a title and then change the length of a video clip earlier than the one with the title attached, the video clip to which the title applies will have moved in time, while the title stays stationary.

I guess that these niggles are relatively minor compared to the SVCD quality problem. Even so, I think I would go for Pinnacle for the ease-of-use if it wasn't for the quality issue. What was your experience there?

[Scooby Doo]

If you have Windows XP you could try Windows Movie Maker 2. It's much better than the original and is considerably easier to use than either Studio 8 or Video Studio 7. You need a third party encoder to write MPEGs though.

I didn't even think of that. How to obtain it?

[MarkE19]

It's a free download from the Micro$oft web site.

Just an update, if anyone's interested, on the Pinnacle Mpeg quality question. I updated Pinnacle SE 7 to version 7.15 and the MPEG quality increased considerably. Haven't been able to verify the V8 quality since the trial version dosn't allow you to encode, but I suspect that it would be accepable too.

With that said, I've just ordered a copy of Ulead V7. I've been using it more while dabbling (because Pinnacle's trial wouldn't let me do what I wanted) so have become more familiar with it and I think the greater flexibility will pay off in the long run.