I use Adobe Premier 6.0 ( old now ) and you can find copies on da net real cheap now. the trick is in the machine, One of my favorite sayings is ( their ant no replacement for displacement ) . The people in earlier post say the Adobe Premier take 8 hours to render must have very slow machines or not using the correct settings.
I use a
INTEL 850 Mother Board
3.2 Gig INTEL chip
2 Gig ram
4 10,000 rpm SCSI drives stripes raid O config. Total or 150 Gig, 1.9 Ms access time
Matrox RT2500 video rendering daughter board

I also have 2 regular hard drives in the machine, 1 for the OS and the other to capture the audio to.
o yea the most important thing, 2 power supplies, 12 cooling fans and a small A/C machine piped to the front to keep things cool. ( A MUST )

I shoot and edit all of Bill Hempels videos, http://billhempel.com/video/index.htm i just recently put all 10 videos on one DVD and rendered and burnt to DVD in less than 30 Min. ( 1.5 Hours of video )

I also use a canon XL-1 @ 16X9 @ 30 frames/ sec. ( 6 megs per frame ) raw

Rick Adams