The fact that Vegas was doing HD was catching a lot of people's attention. Mike had several vegs prepared. I'm sure the pan and crop tools, the velocity envelope, and all of the audio capabilities were big hits as well.

The color correctors seemed to leave some people starry-eyed and mike mentioned "and all of this for $299?" Absolutely a joy to watch.

I agree with what you are saying as I was there as well. The Avid presentaion left me unimpressed except for the multi cam capabilities as well as image stabilization.
Pinnacle had a nice design enabling you to layout your DVD and take advantage of all effects while in the NLE editor before going to bun.
However, Vegas still seemed the best out of the lot for doing extensive editing. I loved seeing everybody's jaw drop when everybody saw all of what Vegas can do with audio. BTW it was the only one there that could do 5.1 surround.

Mike was definitly the best prepared, due to the fact that he is a Vegas insrtuctor as well.

I learned several things that I didn't know, like shuffling clips and learned a bit more on scripting.

It was great fun,
Dezine

I saw part of the Pinnacle and all of the Vegas presentation when they came to Dallas. Since I'm new to Vegas, I picked up a half dozen tricks that I used that day. I was impressed when he grabbed around ten different file types and put them on the timeline...the point being that Vegas will work with almost any type of file. The chroma key was neat also, I haven't tried it and I have a feeling he made it look easier then it really is. It doesn't seem like it would be much work to produce a few training DVD's from his presentation. Since then, I purched Spot's DVD and look forward to more learning. Bottom line with Vegas...it was impressive and I learned a lot and it was free!

Pinnacle: I only caught the last 30 minutes, but I liked what I saw. They can't match Vegas on audio and a couple other points, but they have a good product IMO.

Is it possible to see samples of the finished Shootout?

Grazie