I've recently been comparing the performance of Ulead's HDV codec / plug-in, now offered for free, with their VideoStudio 9 editing program to 2 other programs I have been previously using. I am simply amazed at how fast the Ulead software edits and renders HDV compared to Vegas 6 and Apple's Final Cut Pro Studio HD. From all accounts, as well as from my own experience, the rendering speed of both FCP HD (on a high end dual processor G5) and Vegas 6 (on relatively fast single processor 3.4 GB P4 HT) is glacially slow, typically 10 times slower than real time. Using Cineform or Apple proxy codecs, these products take forever to render. Much to my utter amazement, Ulead's program blows them totally out of the water in speed, by a speed up of maybe 5X. This is no small improvement............and saves many HOURS of rendering time for a typical project. To my relatively untrained eye, the resulting quality form Ulead looks essentially the same as I see from Vegas or FCP. I have not done a lot of testing yet, but my early findings here are just amazing. Has anybody else done a comparison, or have any opinions about relative performance. Since the Apple and Vegas products cost many times as much as VideoStudio9, and yet render at 1/5th the speed, I guess I consider this all to be "too good to be true"....... Any other opinions? Thanks, Smarty