Best software

Give a ugly geek girl when a job needs to get done. Something that is easy to upgrade as technology improves. My first computer was a trash80, then Atari 800 then into PC's. I've never been tempted to go Apple. Upgradeability and software that is more open to competition has always been more important. Heck even Apple finally figured it out and has gone PC under the hood ;)

Hey Scott - you might find it more cost effective to upgrade your Adobe suite.. CS3 is all 32 bit and depends on old school drivers.

Wow, Don--I thought I was the only one who started on a TRS-80 back in the 80s! That was my first love. Did you ever play ZORK or DEATHSTAR? I started programming on those babies (BASIC) and then moved on to C-64 and C-128 and got into machine language programming for 6501/6502 architecture. Went to Mac for awhile in the early 90s (7300/180 powerpc) then on to PC ever since.

I agree with you argument for ease of upgradability. The benefits of being able to tweak outweigh a slightly more stable platform, IMHO.

Our first computer was an Apple 3, bought in 1982 or 3 essentially as a word processer to finish writing a book. Our first video editing program was Media 100. It was the best semi-affordable program avaliable 1995 and it ran only on a MAC. We kept upgrading it for several years and I loved it. We still run it on an ancient MAC on occasion, but times changed. We got a high end PC and tried a couple of programs, but did not bond with either the PC or the programs so we gave it to our graduate student daughter and figured out how to use Final Cut. Its a good editing program and better in many ways than Media 100. But I do miss the ease of use that Media 100 offered.

Here's a good article on software for dlsr video.
http://www.pauljoy.com/2010/12/hdslr-encoding-wars-premiere-pro-vs-final-cut-pro/

Hi Don,
Thank you for the good info. All I retained is that Premiere Pro has problems only when it comes to downscaling and one could avoid them by setting MQR - and that's what I always do.