I'm getting frustrated with the crashiness of Windows Movie Maker. There's a 2.1 version available, but only as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2, which I am avoiding installing as long as I can - it's almost certain to mess up some of the software I depend on. Another problem with Movie Maker is that it can only output DV or WMV files; I'd like to be able to output in MPEG 2 or 4 for archive purposes, since raw DV files are very large.

I went back to MGI Videowave 5, the version that was current when Roxio bought MGI several years ago (sent to me back then by a former colleague). This is in some ways a better editing tool, and at least it's stable; I won't go into detail since this version is no longer on the market. But it outputs MPEG 1 and 2 in some format that Sorenson Squeeze refuses to read, so I can't compress those files into SWF. And its DV output files are poor quality (full of comb artifacts) for some mysterious reason. Since I'd put a lot of effort into editing clips together and getting the music just right, I Squeezed the DV file even though the quality wasn't great.

I'm hoping to lay hands on the latest Creator from Roxio so I can test its video-editing capabilities, in hopes that they're also using better video compression codecs these days.