The features on this piece of software are amazing, the list is incredulous. Color blending, masking and a myriad of other cool abilities.
The only problem is that these cools features are built on top of a very wobbly foundation. Trying to export your project sometimes stops at a certain exact point. So it probably means somethings wrong in your clip, like a bad frame or something. I cut the last second of my project and the export worked. This is great.
I tried the same in my open-source editor Pitivi, and the export worked first time. Wait a minute, I paid $100 for this Pinnacle software and it didn't work, yet my free software worked?
The other thing is general stability. Working on the timeline for a while, clicking here and there as one would expect you should be allowed to do in this kind of software, and all of a sudden the application crashes. They built a nice recovery screen, obviously this is a bug they expect to happen quite often. If there wasn't an ability to recover and edit your previous project, then this would have been a deal-breaker.
Cancelling your export puts the application into a spin, where you have to close it from windows. If cancelling the export isn't possible, why put it in?
Also, don't rely on the 30 day money-back guarantee. If you're using this software in your spare time, make sure you try it out in the first 30 days (unlike me who didn't use it much). If I had known it was so buggy, I would have asked for a refund.
Support is there, but they'll take around 3-4 days of activity before resolving an issue. My first issue was I had to update my graphics card driver, otherwise it would crash. Then another issue was that my directX drivers where missing, so I had to install that, and (I think) it worked.
Really, don't get caught up in the bells and whistles, I looked at the website for the product now, it looks gorgeous. Don't fall for it.
PS: I'm commenting based on PS24, however I'm not using PS25. The upgrade by the way is the same as buying from scratch. It should have been at a lower price since I've made the capital outlay already with the 1st one.
