on the recommendation of a 'friend', i bought Pinnacle 10+ a year ago Xmas (it was a gift to myself). i picked it up fairly quickly and even with it's quirks, was able to finish a couple of projects without any real problems. then for some reason over the summer i started getting hangs during MakeMovie where the disc content was not completely written at the time of the hang. it had something to do with using motion thumbnails on a menu or a motion background for the menu. thinking it was my video card, i upgraded it to a more bleeding edge ATI All-in-wonder - didn't help. still had the occasional hang in MM. that's when i decided to move on. i too saw a reference to Sony's product somewhere on Pinnacles board and thought i'd give it a try. i downloaded the free trial version of VMS and at the same time, ordered a trial of Adobe's Premiere Elements which i also saw referenced. PE had some nice features but it was too limiting as far as menus. you really couldn't create your own - you had to use the supplied samples that came with PE. i also found issues with outputing a project to mpeg2 - the resulting file always played back but without sound. so i moved onto VMS and haven't looked back..