Video Editing Software Question

[mpking]

Since there is a very eclectic group of people here, I figured some people must have experiance with Editing Video Files.

I've recently purchased a camcorder (Santa delivered a Panasonic HDC-SD9).

It's AVCHD, which means it's really new, and not alot of programs support it, (or support it really well)

What's a solid program to edit video with. (Basic Home Video stuff, Baby crawling around, Family stuff.) I don't mind spending up to $150 bucks, But I don't want to move into full bore Editing packages. (AVVID editing stations anyone?)

I'm looking at Adobe Premiere Elements. I'm running the 30 day trial, and so far it seems good. I've got to crank out a video longer than 2minutes to really stress test it, though, as I've already managed to crash it twice. Once because the program does not deal with Unformated DVD-RW discs. The second time was an unspecified encoding error, but I think my page file was too small. Bumped it 4Gigs and it was fine.

I got a free trial to Pinnical 12, but I've seen various reviews that lead me to believe it's clunky, and not much more stable than Adobe.

So what else is out there? Anything from the open source camp? (I use GIMP quite a bit)

Mike

[4zm4r3d02]

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress can handle AVCHD input. The trial version is at http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/download/te4xp.html