I have used Studio 11 Ultimate for about one year with generally satisfactory results (AVCHD to DVD DL). Criticisms of Studio 11 would be the excessive rendering time - 17 hours to produce 63 minutes of AVCHD footage, lack of blu-ray functionality and unable to deal with mpeg-4s. I was convinced the excessive rendering time was a limitation of my hardware (3Ghz dual core Pentium; 2GB DDR ram; GF6600/256). Recently I purchased new hardware (Q6600 quad core; 3GB DDR2 RAM; 8500GT/512) including GGW-H20L BD writer. So with great anticipation I installed Studio 12, thinking the rendering rates would decrease substantially and I would be able to write 90 minute HD movies to single BD-R/RE. In fact neither expectation has been realised.

Studio 12 crashes on a VERY frequent basis. This became so frustrating I purchased a new SATA drive and performed a clean installation of XP Pro sp3 plus Studio 12 - nothing else. No AV, no firewall, just the O/S, Studio 12 and the latest DX and hardware drivers. It still crashes on a frequent basis.

Consequently there have been frequent disc wipes and reinstalls of the O/S and Studio 12 with basically no improvement whatsoever. Herein lies another issue. There is no embedded uninstall routine in Studio 12, at least none that I could find. Working with XP's "Add/Remove Programs", dozens of Pinnacle files/folders were left behind after the uninstall. They had to be deleted manually. Not helpful!  A search of the registry after the uninstall and after running Pinnacle's "Regdelete" rotine, revealed 132 orphaned registry entries which I had to remove manually. Not helpful! So much for the sage advice: "Delete Studio 12 and perform a cleam reinstall". How? Not helpful!

As a test I imported four mt2s files from my Sony HDR-SR7 which I had previously processed suvccessfully with Studio 11. With Studio 12 it took 7 minutes for these files to embed in the timeline??!! The files would not render. So my current frustration is that I am trying to glue together 4 x 130MB mpeg-4 files. No special effects, no menus or chapters; just a straight glue job. I have tried 7 times with various bit rates and rendering options. On average it took10 minutes for the files to embed in the timeline. In 5 rendering attempts, "Export errors" were produced at random stages in processing the 170,000 frames. On 2 attempts the rendering commenced but the program crashed.

I' m guessing of course but I think I have spent about 30 hours over the past two weeks trying to make this darned thing work. To no avail.

On a whim I purchased the Canadian "Studio" editing program. It processed my test mt2s files without incident, glued together my mpeg-4 files and wrote to BD-RE without incident. So I'm done with Pinnacle. They've had $260 from me during the past year or so plus countless hours of wasted effort trying to overcome problems which I don't understand and which should not be there in the first place.

For me, Studio 12 is truly "The Program from Hell".