You can upgrade from Studio 9 to LE, by that I mean there is an upgrade path. However, the two applications are completely different from each other. One good thing though is that from LE 6.0 you can port your studio projects into Liquid Edition.

With regards the competition movies, I think most people here are using Premiere Pro (or Premiere 6.5).

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Lloyd

That's my opinion. If you don't like it I have others

System: Apple Macbook Pro 17, and an external Freecom 500GB eSATA drive.
Software: Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, DVD Studio Pro 4, Compressor 3), Sonicfire Pro 4.5
Favourite Resources: Findsounds.com, Free DVD menus, Ken Stone's FCP Page, Wikivid