In order to adequately describe my situation this post is a little long so please bear with me.

So im a recently graduated high school senior that is trying to transfer in the vaunted University Of Texas School of Communications. In attempt to raise my chances of getting in I want to barrage the professors with examples of my work. All through high school I did my work on the film department Macs with Final Cut Pro. Now that i have graduated I need my own all my own equipment. Now i went out and got myself a brand new DV camera, and as a very generous graduation gift my parents got me an extra suped up Dell Inspiron 1505 Laptop. So now im in the market for a high preformance editing software to work with. Since Final Cut Pro is off the table with my having a PC, I researched a bit and I found that Avid's software is on the same level, and that i could get Avid Xpress Pro 5.7 HD at a low academic price. But now i found that Avid's software doesnt work with Windows Vista which came standard on my computer. After Avid everything points to other editing softwares for PCs as being subpar. So now im wondering what i should do now. Wait however long it takes for Avid to be supported on Vista, OR should I invest in a possibly less able software that i can use now and if so what softwares do you suggest, and why do suggest it.

Thank you very much for reading through my post and i will appreciate any and all comments, and responses

Go with Adobe Production Premium (I think that's the name) - it's the editing version of the CS3 collection. That includes all you will need, with equals to all of FCS's programs except for Color. It also includes After Effects, which is an incredibly useful and powerful program. The entire suite runs around $600 for the academic version. The Avid software would be WAY too expensive, and the version you could afford would not be nearly as good as the Adobe collection.

Good luck!

Avid may be superior in performance to the other software options, but it is known for be un-user-friendly and the learning curve is quite steep.

If you don't have anything too valuable yet on your hard drive, I would suggest installing Windows XP. Not a huge fan of Vista at all.

Also it is possible to run Mac OS X on your laptop. You could even partition your hard drive and have a double boot. (so you could have two operating systems of your choice)

If he already has Vista, he should keep it. While it's not the best operating system in the world, it is inarguably better than XP (Vista is actually more stable and slightly more secure). Keep Vista unless it proves incompatible with a necessary program.

If you want the good Avid, you'll have to buy the entire Xpress series, which is well over $1000. With Adobe, you'll get many great programs (including Photoshop and, again, AFTER EFFECTS) that will do more than you need for much less. I actually even thought of switching from Final Cut to Creative Suite - the only thing that kept me back was when Apple finally updated Motion to be somewhat equal with After Effects.