Pinnacle Studio 15 | Canon Rebel T3i Video editing.

[FattyMealtime]

I have Pinnacle Studio 15 and have used Pinnacle for years, since verion 9.3. I love video editing and enjoy teaching myself new things to do with it. I have upgraded recently from a Canon Point and Shoot which took 720 HD footage to the T3i which takes 1080 HD footage and looks way better (When I get the focusing right, hehe). I've run into a lot of problems with editing the files created (H.264, .mov) as they chug a lot in the editor. I have tried them in a couple other editors too including PowerDirector and they seem to chug in all programs, which make it very frustrating to edit. Pinnacle seems to crash a lot after editing every 2 or 3 clips and I don't know what to do? Should I be encoding/transcoding my files before editing them? I don't want to lose much noticable quality but I need to do something to get these episodes of my lame YouTube show out. I downloaded a couple of video converters but am not sure what settings to choose. I tried AVS Video converter and chose (HD Video 1080p, H.264/AVC 4200kbps Audip MP3 256kbps but it's crap compared to the original's bitrate of over 44,000+ and audio bitrate of 1536+. Do the numbers matter much for quality? All I know is the re-encoded file is chugging and the originals play fine on my computer. I just want to be able to edit the video without a headache, any ideas?

I'm not sure what all you need for specs....
AMD Phenom II P960 Quad Core 1.8Ghz
8GB Ram
AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series (Crap I know, but it's a laptop that I originally didn't intend for video editing)
Windows 7 64 Bit

[CaptionWorld]

Hello and Welcome to the forum

Did your original 720HD edit OK? This could give some clues. I know Pinnacle uses the computers resources to the max anyway in particular HD. By the look of it your spec should be adequate.
just a thought but you could try uploading as is to Youtube than down load again in the Youtube 1080 format and try editing from there.

[CaptionWorld]

Just found this link on Pinnacle forum.

[FattyMealtime]

The original 720HD edited perfect, with no blockiness or chugging or stuttering, but these newer files seem to be a challenge for it. Uploading to YouTube and downloading wouldn't work as each episode has between 150-200 clips that total around 15-20GB so that would just take forever. I was just wondering if there was a HD format which video editors handled easier than what I have now.