I (and many others) have documented our beginnings with Studio, but basically mine revolved around a series of ceremonies involving chants, incantations, and candles to get Studio to run for longer than 2 hours or render anything longer than 10 minutes.

I bought VideoFactory just for the pan and zoom on photos. Interface took a little getting used to, but boy was it stable.

I soon grew tired of Studio's instability and tried a trial of Premiere 6 for about an hour before it crashed, and never opened it again. Tried Vegas 4 and loved it. Bought Vegas 5, upgraded to 6, and just upgraded to 7.

I still have Studio installed just as a host for SmartSound and Hollywood FX, both of which have gotten less and less use as time goes on...

1. Video Factory (the world changed, all things are possible)
2. Pinnacle Studio w/MJPEG capture card--Great capture quality
(Acid Music--got used to the Madison interface)
3. Other straight consumer programs--Canopus Let's Edit, Magix, MGI Videowave,Sonic
4. Vegas 3 (sound of trumpets)
(Sound Forge 6 w/Noise Reduction 2)
5. Vegas 4+DVDA (esp. 4.0d--the 24p update with 3-wheel color=permanently hooked)
(Sound Forge 7)
(Pinnacle Studio 9 "Plus", various DVD programs)
(Vegas Movie Studio+Platinum, 2 upgrades for the bonus software & 'show me hows')
6. Vegas 5+DVDA2 (established film editor tells me "you just did in 90 seconds what it would take me 15 minutes to do in Avid and ProTools")
(Sound Forge 8, CD Architect)
7. Adobe Premiere Elements, Avid freeDV out of curiosity
8. Vegas 6+DVDA3
9. Vegas 7+DVDA4

Still have the manual & discs of Video Factory. Sigh.

MGI Videowave plus TMEPGEnc, made LOTS of VCDs for Chinese clients with Nero for authoring.
PPro 6.5, still have a soft spot for it.
Vegas 4
Vegas 5
Vegas 6
Vegas 7

MGI Videowave came with my ATI All in Wonder (original card). Kind of unstable.
Pinnacle Studio (v3 or v4 I think)
Then got Lumiere (corel bought them or originally made it). Development on it stopped, so everyone went to other tools. This was the most powerful of the above so far.
Pinnacle 4, 5, 6, 7. (I should have learned not to)
In the middle of that, got Vegas demo, machine was not powerful enough.
Pinnacle 8, then finally mad enough at it to totally uninstall. I keep it on one machine to only convert digital camera videos (MJPEG)
Then Vegas 4, 5, 6 and now 7.

Also throw a cheap version of Ulead in there somewhere.

... (and many others) have documented our beginnings with Studio, but basically mine revolved around a series of ceremonies involving chants, incantations, and candles to get Studio to run for longer than 2 hours or render anything longer than 10 minutes...."

Hah! I hear ya. I don't remember if it had some sort of autosave feature or not, but I was always hitting save after pratically every single edit for fear of losing recent work.

Studio 8 (worst software of any kind I ever owned. Period.)
Vegas 4
Vegas 5
Vegas 6 (& Boris Red 3GL)
Vegas 7 (& Boris Red 4)

...ain't going anywhere... :)

Avid Media Composer 1000
Speed Razor (on DEC Alpha)
Vegas 3
Vegas 4
Vegas 5

sometime in 2000 I went to work for a TV station. I eventually (within a few weeks) got to be editor. We had Premier 5 & a Targa capture/playback card. P5 was really nice IMHO. Then i was asked to upgrade the system. I did some research based on articles in DV magazine (which led me to places on the net) & I thought VV3 would be the best thing we could get. After ~a month of research & such, I told my boss & he said "No, we're getting Premiere 6 & a Matrox RT2500. It does real time mpeg & we use mpeg for our commercial player." "But i don't believe it rendered mpeg in real time, it will still take a while to render." "No, says right on their website "real time mpeg. Plus the video shop in the other town uses it."

So we got P6 & the Matrox 2500. Man, did THAT sucks. P6 seems like a comlpete piece of goat crap compared to P5. Most of the shortcuts were changed, it crashed, ran slow as hell, & the RT2500 was just as bad. :(

I downloaded a copy of V3 at the time to play with it & was really impressed. I bought the Vegas 3 book with a copy of V3 LE. I then upgraded to V4 on it's release day. Now I've got V6. :D (i should note that when i was asked to design a computer for our sister station I got V4 for it. I was given the same "sales pitch" by my boss for P6/RT2500 as before, i told it it WAS a load of crap & V4 can do everything faster & easier & cheaper. Then I loaded up a copy of V4, captured clips in mpeg-2 via an el-cheapo ATI AIW 7500, then edited down and rendered (with batch render scripting no less!) 5 TV show spots in less time then it took me to edit down stuff in P6. :D )

I bought my daughter a dazzle cature and edit thing. We never did make it work.

Started a job with a video related company and got a copy of Pinnacle studio to try out - crashed my brand new sony viao and that as the end of Pinnacle.

Saw the Spot Vegas 4 training and had to have it.
Vegas 5 upgrade
Vegas 6 upgrade
vegas 7 upgrade

Owned and used for projects:

Ulead 1
something I've forgotten the name of
MGI Videowave 3
Pinnacle Studio 6 & 7
Vegas 3 - 7

Along the way I sampled Ulead 5, Premiere, and Avid but liked Vegas too much to bother to learn them fully.

Mid 90's started with FAST VM/DDPR Plus with full range of frame accurate Betacam SP, DV, DVCPro, DVCAM and S-VHS decks. Full tape and digital insert editing system. Still using it for the main system but added Vegas starting with VV2 and all the way to VV7 now. I use the two together for the total package for speed and layering.

Gary

Home hobbiest here -- not a pro...

Several years ago, before I had a digital camcorder, I bought some kind of Dazzle digital converter package to try to load my Hi-8 tapes onto my PC (probably 166 Mhz Pentium?) Installed the software, tried it, and right off it had some kind of bug that reversed the fields after capture. Got onto Dazzle's website, found tons of complaints, and took the converter back within days, figuring that as a total noob, I'd better wait for home video to mature a bit.

A couple years ago, got a miniDV camcorder. Bought a really cheap firewire card at CompUSA ($19 on sale) that came *with* a cable and a "lite" version of ULEAD. "Hey, this is pretty cool! I can put titles on my videos, edit, etc. I'm gonna look into this."

Did some research on camcorderinfo.com and prevailing wisdom at the time indicated that Premiere Elements and Vegas Movie Studio were probably best for home users. Saw numerous comments about Vegas' stability, and comments that Premiere probably had a slightly steeper learning curve (user interface). Bought VMS 4.

VMS 6 Platinum came out just 3 or 4 months after that, and I upgraded then (and about that time discovered these Sony forums).

Just recently, bought the $99 Vegas 6 from B&H, and immediately upgraded to Vegas 7 + DVD for another $149. Not sure my home hobbiest use justifies it, but it was just too good of a deal to pass up.

Tim L

Pre-NLE, I was using prosumer Hi8 and SVHS editing decks. It seems that insert editing, flying erase heads and edit controllers aren't mentioned too much nowadays in the video production lexicon.

But for all of PITA problems that can crop up with NLE editing, it's so much better than the analog days.

Hi

I started to get interested in videoediting, because we at the company where I work started to sell Pinnacle (now Avid) products back in '99.
So I started with Studio and Premiere 5.1 on different hardware solutions from Pinnacle. I have used Liquid a lot too.
On the Vegas front I have been using ver. 6 only very little, but now I am getting to know ver. 7 and I love it a lot so far.
Thanks to this community too for help and support.

/Ulf

I got Studio 7 with a capture card. It seemed ok except I didn't use it much.
Decided to try to upgrade to Studio 8 (like a fool) and, of course, it was worse.

Due to many promises by pinnacle (all hollow) I was foolish enough to try Studio 9. I never did get it to work and Pinnacle was NO HELP at all.

While looking around for another editing software, I tried the consumer versions of Ulead, MGI, Avid Express, a 'borrowed' copy of PP6 and a few others that I don't remember. While they were all better than studio, they all had quirks or limitations that I didn't like.

While looking for some 'support' (read abuse) for pinnacal studio 9, I heard about Vegas. I bought 6+DVD and recently upgraded to 7+DVD. Like was said about pinnacle being the worst of any software, Vegas appears to be one of the best. Rock stable, powerful, flexible and easy to use. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here. :-)

VideoSlave! Total POOOH! Yuck!!! It nearly stopped me from going ANY further with this NLE work. Truly!

Then a chap - "VinceG" from here said on the VideoKnave Forum "Hey Grazie! Try VideoFactory!"

But tried Studio6>7 - Booted VideoNaff outta the window . . And around Studio7 got, here in London, a hard to obtain copy of VideoFactory and thought "Ah! Is THAT how this stuff is supposed to work - eh?!? RIGHT!" Haven't looked back.

Progressed to:
VV 3
VV 4
Vegas5 > 6 and now 7

I've seen FCP, Prem and AVID at shows and at high-end edit studios and think very lovingly about Vegas and what I can do and quickly and easily I can try out sketches of stuff and adapt and move on.

1. Windows Moviemaker.

Started to put together clips shot with Sony still camera (capable of 30 sec "video").

2. Vegas 4c September 2003

Bought Sony TRV-33 miniDV-camera to record my nephews wedding (always start from top, why practise beforehand ;) ). I shot 5 tapes woth of material and immediately understood that I need more than Windows Moviemaker. Actually the reason for changing the app was that my TRV-33 had (still has) very lousy sound quality: the tape drive sound is transferred to tape. Therefore I needed app which would have possibility to tweak the sound.

And after that I've been a Vegas convert. (V5; V7)

I had to transfer Hi8 tapes to my PC, i bought the Pana GS400, i did that and things seemed interesting, i then researched for an easy NLE for family stuff that would do Wide screen and heard good things about Vegas Movie Studio, i bought it and loved it in 2004, then i upgraded to V6 and now V7.

am a big fan of SONY products.

The very first program I got acquainted with was ULEAD, I forgot what version it was. Then I moved to PINNACLE because it was the cheapest analogue (USB) video input box I could find. Then I tried PREMIERE 4 or 5 and AVID (while doing internship) for a while. Then I was introduced to VEGAS 4 and never looked back since!

Started with Vegas 1 as an audio sweetening tool to be used with the 3/4" decks in my edit suite. Upgraded to Vegas 2 and stopped there for awhile. I was using the Toaster as my switcher, titler & 3D app.
Eventually picked up a dpsVelocity and used that for a while.
Fast forward a few more years to a new job, still using the dpsVelocity. Started looking into a simple package for student use and remembered Vegas. Jumped back in at Vegas 4 and have stayed with it ever since (now at V7 & DVDA 4).
I do miss the real time feature of the dpsVelocity but the audio tools in Vegas (as well as the ease of use for students) more than make for it.

Mike

Are we talking just NLE here, or any editing system? Cause I first learned in the bad old days of tape-to-tape linear editing. I had two JVC S-VHS decks and a controller. I don't miss those days at all!

As for NLE, my progression goes like this:

1. Some weird experimental system imported from Germany; it may have been an early MainConcept offering. I don't remember the name of it. We used it on my first documentary to insert titles. Any time there was an error (and there were plenty!) a dialog box would pop up shouting "Wake Up!" It also gave a weird color cast to all the video behind the titles. A nightmare.

2. Canopus DV Raptor with Adobe Premiere 5.1. I still remember the awe I felt at hooking up the firewire to my VX1000 and actually getting the video onto my hard disk! And I could play it back from the disk! At full frame playback! (This was on a Celeron 400 with a whopping 40gb hard drive)

2a. The same DVRaptor card with CanopusEdit. Completely bulletproof NLE, but lacked features. It seemed Canopus wasn't really interested in supporting it, so I abandoned it. (After I jumped ship, Canopus came out with Edius, which looked really promising, but I never had time to try it out.)

2b. The same DVRaptor card with Premiere 6.0. 6.0 had a lot of great featuers (like a storyboard-- God, I miss that storyboard!), but it was buggy. Canopus phased out support for the Raptor, and I got tired of waiting for the right combination of hardware driver updates and Adobe software fixes to make everything work as it should.

3. Vegas 4. I had used Sound Forge to do radio news production since Sonic Foundry was just starting out and Sound Forge was a shareware program. I was keenly interested in Vegas and tried out VegasVideo, V2 and V3, but it didn't have enough tools for the long-form documentaries I was working on. I downloaded the public beta of V4, wrote a rave review of it on the now-defunct www.abcdv.com, bought my own copy and never looked back. After my Canopus experience, I've especially appreciated not being wedded to any particular hardware. I've upgraded religiously every time since, through V5, V6 and V7 and haven't regretted it.

Got a copy of Pinnacle Studio 8 LE with my first DVD burner, and immediately upgraded to the full version after making a quick DVD using the included "Photo Shoot" video clips. (which was probably the only video that could successfully be edited and burned to DVD, or so it seemed...) Was highly excited and impressed at the ease-of-use and utility of the Studio interface!

This lasted for about 15 days, at which time I realized that the DVD burner was the biggest piece of crap that ever floated, and I returned it in favor of a different brand. About 3 days after that, it became apparent that much of the difficulty I had with the burner could be laid at Pinnacle's doorstep, as the fabled instability of Studio 8 and the endless fix-one-thing-break-another beta cycle wasted many tens of frustrating, maddening hours, hundreds of $ in computer upgrades and thousands of suicidal hair follicles.

"Upgraded" to Studio 9, and eventually found a version that ran quite reliably, even permitting direct capture to compliant mpeg2 video and creating DVDs without A/V sync problems -- somewhat of a major victory for Studio at the time.

But I saw the writing on Pinnacle's wall as their next official release of Studio 9 appeared to be a major step backwards, and bought a copy of Sony Screenblast. Although I was totally sold on the stability and power of Screenblast, I read enough complaints about the limitations of the included Sonic My DVD that I never bothered to try to create a single disc with it.

After a quick look at Vegas 4 near the end of its lifetime, I bought Vegas 5/DVDA-2. I'm totally sold on the stability and feature-rich functionality of the SMS software, and have followed the upgrade path through Vegas 6/DVDA-3 to V7 & DVDA-4.

I also bit on the Cinescore offer, which I'm hoping will eventually eliminate my single remaining reason for hanging on to Studio 9, (SmartSound) and allow me to send Pinnacle to that great bit bucket in the sky, where it belongs.