But when doing video editing, rendering and processing, you really notice these things. I can remember doing ray traces in the early nineties, when there was no PC available that could do a photo-realistic 15-second animation in anything short of a week. That's even giving them the benefit of the doubt - I can recall doing some quick artithmatic and realizing that a 486-50 would have taken something like 200 days to do a brief animation I was working on. Even Macintosh's and Amiga's were slow for this kind of work. But I had a parallel processing network that I used as a rendering engine, so I could "crank 'em out" in a relatively short span of a few days.

These kinds of video systems are really exciting to me. It's been a long time since working with a new technology sparked me like that one did.

I am with you in being really excited about the new technology. Some of the newer dual processor units out there hold 4 Gigs of ram, are based on 64 bit architecture and can process in the 8 Gigaflop range. With Maya 4, huge and I mean huge animations can be rendered at 30 fps with sophisticated skins in a matter of hours. Certainly not your 486-50!!!

Does Pinnacle make an editing product that would be in the same general league as Final Cut Pro?

I have an older version of Studio 8 that I've messed around with.

Crystal