I have dabbled with video editing software (Adobe Premiere and Studio Pinnacle) several years in the past with fairly mediocre results. I would like to solicit this group's advice for software and hardware to help me with the following situation.

I am an eye surgeon and want to be able to edit surgical video for education and presentations. Our surgical video is captured by an analog single chip Zeiss camera that attaches to a surgical microscope via a C mount. The video travels via coaxial cable to a converter box that exports it via S-video cable to a standard home DVD recorder (Toshiba, I think). The video is recorded onto DVD with files that have .vob extensions. Although these files can be easily viewed on another DVD player, I have difficulty opening them with most computer viewing and editing programs.

Here is what I have tried so far:

On my PC's, I can capture video with Pinnacle Studio (on separate machines, I have versions 10.x and 11), but I find that Pinnacle crashes my computers all the time. On the PC with v. 10.x, I have 3 gigabytes of RAM and Windows XP Pro. On the PC with Pinnacle v. 11, I have only 1 gig of RAM (the maximum for this older machine) and Windows XP Pro.

On my Apple MacBook with Leopard, I have to convert the vob files with a program from Roxio called Popcorn in order to edit with iMovie, but Popcorn seems cumbersome and also tends to crash the computer.

So, what should I do?

Would Adobe Premier (my version is five years old and woefully outdated) work better than Pinnacle Studio? Can it import .vob files from a DVD?

Should I buy a new Mac (rumor has it that Macs are better for video--is it true?) and use Final Cut or Final Cut Pro?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Lots of people find pinaccle unstable - shamefully so often.

Most up to date editiors should handle vobs without transcoding, but you will always need to copy to your hd and sometimes the .vob needs to be renamed .avi or .mpg to work.

Try some free trails - see the links tab up top for links to trials.

I suggest trying the latest version premier as you are familiar with that.

As for macs, no, they are not better for video editing. Mac has spent buckets on advertsiing to create that myth.