I read the reviews and used the trial versions of PowerDirector, Corel Visual Studio and Magix Movie Edit Pro. To start, I was prejudiced towards Corel - they got the #1 rating here and Corel has been around. My PC - 2.3mhz dual core, 4gb ram, 320 hd space. The video card is not the swiftest - NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. I do need to upgrade the video card for sure. My experience. * Corel and Power Director would routinely crash. Magix has YET to crash on me. Advantage: Magix. * The 'score' or 'timeline' in Magix is the most flexible - by FAR. If you have ever authored in Flash or Adobe Director, you will instantly fall in love with Magix. You can put anything anywhere. You cannot do that with Power Director or Corel. Advantage: Magix. * Transitions in Magix are about as simple - and as powerful as they get. Simply overlay one video on the other - dragging it around until you get the amount of time you want for the transition. Then, pick a transition type - there are LOTS. It transitions. Wow! This was too easy - did I do something wrong. *Audio: Drop in an audio file. Drop in another. Cut, chop, overlay - perfect. Set the volume, so easy. In a few hours of using Magix, I got farther - faster than the other ones I used in the trial. And I only scratched the surface of what this thing will do. For video editing - It's the best this side of spending $800 for Premiere. Okay, some people complained. *They probably don't have the hardware. (Of course they will say that they do) * They are probably running 50 things while working. * They probably did not think through all the potential gotcha's that are inherent in video editing. You have to have very powerful processors - dual core much preferred. You must have at least -3- gb ram. You need fast hard drives. You need a powerful graphics card - I admit - mine is maybe 6 out of 10 in performance. You need this kind of hardware for ANY of the video editing packages - not just Magix. I went to the support forums for all the products - the complaints were all similar - problems I was not having - so I presume that people were not reading the manual and just pushing buttons. After about 2 days of playing with all 3 programs, I dropped the dime and got Magix. Have had it for over -1- month now, and it has not crashed YET! I finished my project and it came out WAY better than I thought. It looks beautiful on the TV and the sound through the stereo is crystal clear. So, what are the problems with Magix. 1. Is not really a problem - it's a feature - and actually - it's an entirely separate functionality. DVD Menu creation is not Magix Movie Edit Pro forte. Video Editing is it's forte. The DVD Menu creation is weak. You can do simple menus - and they have a lot of templates - but you will not be doing advanced features in your menus. You'll need to buy another product to do that (Sony). However, this limitation is not strictly to Magix. Historically, Video Editing and DVD Authoring have been two different things - and maybe - it's best that way. 2. Others have said that Magix Movie Edit Pro has the power, but it's not intuitive to get to that power. Well, once beyond the basics (which are super easy in Magix) they do have a point. Once past the basics - I guess you got to read the manual and online help? If you complain about that, then, I cannot help you. So there it is. After hands-on with 3 of the products here, Magix flat out performs. Use Magix for the video editing and Sony DVD Architect Studio to build the DVD menus. With this combination - you will be producing fantastic looking, professional quality DVD's. You'll spend a bit more for this combo - but it's worth it.