I am currently using pinnacle studio 9.4 and frankly its a pain, crashing and hanging up and sometimes it won't even let me watch my projects reliably. I am thinking of changing over to Adobe premiere and was wondering on what the potential gains / loses are? Will i lose any functionality or gain functionality? Is it a more complex program to use etc? Please advise!

I had Pinnacle Studio 8 and it was terrible aswell. That's not saying Adobe Premiere doesn't have its problems. I found it very limited in the number of video capture cards it supports and has problems with mpeg files. I have an analogue capture card in my pc (I have a lot of old vhs tapes I need to get transferred to dvd) and unfortunatley Premiere Pro doesn't recognise it. So I have to use another program to capture with and export the file as avi and open it in Premiere, edit it, apply effects etc and then burn out to dvd. It is a LOT more complicated than your previous software but stick with it and the results are top class. You do need a pc with a high spec to make it run smoothly and not be waiting around all day for files to render.

__________________
Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...