I’ve learned to really like Vegas editor. It beats Pinnacle. It can handle 4k raw video extremely well.
I have only played with HD, ie, burning video to DVD. But I have used the AC3 stereo capability a lot with SD DVDs. It has some very powerful audio processing capabilities.
Slide shows are nice too with all of the blending, cropping and mixing! Haven't created a 5.1 surround sound video yet. That would be cool.
Anyway, I had a side business of converting media to DVDs — wedding videos, audio tapes, special occasions, religious shows, VHS, 8mm, hi8, min-DV. I also created video slide shows and then played them for family reunions, 50th anniversaries.
4K raw video — MPEG2? do you render it to an intermediate format first? That was a nice feature. Took a little extra time but it made it a heck a lot easier to edit.
The rendering time is probably still a killer. Especially with HD video. But being able to distribute the render across multiple computers and a network was very nice. I used that a few times. Follows the law of diminishing returns though because of network latency.
Anyway, I mostly use it now for family videos and rendering to HD wmv which plays very nicely on my HD TV via the USB port.