Looking for a NLE software product

[mpking]

So I got a AVCHD camcorder for christmas (Panasonic HDC-SD9).

What's the recommended *newbie* NLE Softwared. A few years ago it used to be Adobe Premier Elements.

I'm currently running a trial of Adobe Premiere Elements, but it seems a little buggy with the AVCHD support. (I've crashed it a few times (Couldn't handle unformated DVDRW media, and didn't grow the page file past 1GB (I manually resized my page file to 4GB and that crash has not repeated)

So what should I look at? My needs are pretty simple, it's mostly home video/family stuff.

Since it might be important here are my system specs:
Core 2 Duo e8400
Nvidia 7600GT (CUDA Supported)
Vista 32bit Ultimate SP1
4GB of ram (I know I'm losing .75 gig cause of the 32 bit OS)
1TB 7200RPM drive. (With another in the near future most likely)

[DB83]

I assume you mean 'unfinalised' not 'unformated'

Take a look at Ulead VideoStudio X2 (free trial available )

[mpking]

Nope. Unformated DVD-RW disc caused it to crash. Exported the project to a folder, and used imgburn to burn the DVD, and it prompted me to format the DVD.

[DB83]

Pardon my ignorance here but if the disk is 'unformated' and 'RW' you aint gonna have anything recorded on to it so there will not be anything to import.

Well that's my experience with RW's

[Midzuki]

I have never understood why ImgBurn always wants to "format" the rewritable DVDs
Prassi ONES never complains about "unformatted" rewritable media.

\\\\\

[mpking]

It's most likely I did a poor job of explaining the bug. I was trying to export to a blank, out of the box, never used DVD-RW.
The video I was importing was from my AVCHD camcorder.

BTW, I'm burning a DVD from Ulead VideoStudioX2 right now. Seems pleasent so far.

[mpking]

Well, everything was going peachy till I decided to try a 30 minute movie, with transitinos, text, and audio, and output to a DVD. Crashed on the DVD burn. But so far this is the only crash, I didn't get this far with premeire yet.

[DB83]

Don't use Ulead to burn.

Yiu should have an option to save to your hard drive as either an ISO or to folders. You can then test the dvd from the hard drive with either VLC player (or something similar) for the ISO or POwerDVD for the folders.

Use Imgburn to burn the ISO or folders

[mpking]

Well. I caused ULEAD to crash enough times that it pissed me off.

I'm trying Sony Vegas Platinum edition (The consumer edition) right now. So far no crashes, and it seems to work very well. Not as user friendly as the other products, but seems much more powerful. (maybe I'm mistaking user unfriendlyness for powerful features)

But I've thrown more complex projects at it that premiere elements and Ulead, and it hasn't bombed out on me yet.