Hi
Just thought I'd add my twopennorth as I am similarly thinking about the Canopus/Premiere bundle offer (available for £326 at dvstuff.co.uk)!
I have recently spent a lot of time investigating the different products and issues around video editing, especially with a view to getting all my old 8mm stuff into digital form and burning DVDs. The conclusions I came to were that stability and reliability are my absolute number one priorities. I have spent too many hours surfing too many message boards where people are stuck with problems they can't fix, which might have a thousand undetectable causes due to IRQ conflicts, incompatible software and other driver glitches which you could spend your life trying to overcome. All of us, I assume,want to spend our time editing and burning and using these tools not tearing our hair out trying to get them to work.
Given the enormouss size and data processing requirements associated with DV any activity takes a lot of elapsed time so that overall "turnaround" for a solution to a problem can be days - e.g, get stumped, post on a message board for a possible solution, wait a day for a response, try the fix, leave something running overnight to see if it works, come across another glitch, repeat ad nauseam. So, I would rather sacrifice anything else than stability and reliability.
For this reason I am only considering stuff from companies with rock-solid reputations and/or the stuff that came preloaded on my PC as long as I don't try to fiddle with it. I am ignoring completely anything from Pinnacle, and also doing my best to ignore any other low-end stuff which might struggle on projects which involve more than 20 minutes of DV footage. Further ruling out stuff which costs silly money, this pretty much leaves me with the Canopus/Adobe offer mentioned above.
I have been tinkering for the past few days with the stuff which came on my Sony VAIO and, to be honest, it pretty much seems to allow me to do most of what I want with what came on it. I can capture analog footage to AVI or MPG files - and convert between the two; I can burn DVDs and edit using MovieMaker very easily, and according to what I have read I can also copy captured/digitised analog footage back out to DV tape (just haven't got round to trying this yet). If I need anything more fancy I can use Adobe Premiere 6 LE. Its a 3Ghz P4 with 512mb RAM which fairly flies and all for £750. For another £100 I'll be putting in a 2nd 160Gb HDD and another 512Mb memory.
So, why am I rambling on at you here? Well, I read the Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom Book to help me decide whether I wanted to use Premiere or not and it's not that scary but I guess it depends on your background - if you're any good at using something like Excel then the complexities of Premiere shouldn't scare you;on the other hand if you wouldn't know a pivot-table from an array then you're probably best sticking to things like MovieMaker. In just a few hours I found that I could very easily knock together a demo video using MovieMaker but, just as quickly, found that some things I wanted to do (fiddle with the sound to get rid of wind noise, have more than 4 credits rolling at the end, etc) were things I'd need something beefier for. So perhaps I'll use MovieMaker for assembling rough cuts and Premiere for fine-tuning - we'll see.
At any rate what I am already finding, even as I am just dipping my toes into the video editing water, is that many of the apparently daunting options that Premiere presents you with (e.g, the opening dialog window with a whole host of different settings for your project) you can (a) probably just click on the default selection to start with;but more importantly (b) you WILL need to understand what the options mean even if you don't want to because the video-editing process requires them of you - ie., you can't expect to be able to capture, edit and burn if you don't understand the difference between MPG and AVI (let alone AVI types 1 and 2), don't know what codecs are the difference between resolutions and file sizes required. Premiere just throws them at you straight off rather than letting you get stuck in in ignorance and learn them later.
Anyway, what are my points:
1. Premiere 6 and Premiere Pro are sufficiently similar that a book on one should give you the basics on the other. I got my book from PC World so it shouldn't be too hard to find and if the book doesn't put you off I'd say go for it
2. Assuming all decent packages have some learning curve, and that all people who respond on forums have a bias towards whatever they personally use, you're not going to find true objective advice as to what is best for you. So you might as well pick one product which will do what you want, grit your teeth and spend time learning how to use it, rather than flitting between several and having to relearn a little each time. The grass is always greener.
3. Base your choices on solidity - just think how much being stymied from finishing a project for 1 week or more every few months is worth it to you (£50? £100? £200? more?) and add that to your budget before you buy. Time and stress are money. There are no guarantees but, inevitably, you get what you pay for.
4. The forums (not especially this one) for video editing and so on are full of people trying to do fairly complicated stuff on the cheap using hacks to noddy software, weird combinations of programs involving file conversions needed between each one, esoteric freeware packages and so on and staggering from one problem to the next. There are an awful lot of helpful people out there who can help when you get stuck but your biggest help is not getting stuck in the first place.
Ooops. This has turned into more of a rant than a help I guess so apologies if it hasn't helped! On the plus side it's helped me decide I'm going to buy this Canopus/Adobe bundle even if it turns out I don't need it. The price is too good to be true and if I don't need it I can always sell it unopened on eBay.
good luck with whatever you decide