I had just purchase Studio 9, after playing with Studio 8 which was offered free with my camcorder. I was doing a comparison between this book and the manual that came with pinnacle. It seems like the guys over at pinnacle just list out what the software can do but never list why you would want to do things. That`s where this book was an amazing help. It actually lists why you would want to do something verses just how to do it. So I figured this was a good time for me to attempt to convert my VHS wedding video to DVD. I had from way back a dazzle component that my VCR hooked up to and converted it from VCR to mpeg on my pc (2 gigs) added menus etc and rendered to dvd. This process took, about 10 hours!! (Pentium 3 800mhz 256 ram Dell) The dvd came out and only played on pc not my home dvd player, plus the audio was like 5 minutes behind my video. Amazingly the solution was in this book! It said to remove menus, render to avi, and then try again. Well, I did that and it turned a 2gig mpeg, to a 26gig avi, I added the avi to my project, added all the menus back (I had written down the chapter and timecode before converting, this made it 10 times faster when adding them back to avi) and worked like a charm. I have to admit, I am very impressed at how much research is done. It seems like this book has come across all the issues that came up and had an answer for them. The Visual Quick Start Guide is a must for those who plan on doing anything with pinnacle 9!!