Unfortunatly, great performance comes with a not-so-great price tag. At $799 for the full version of Premiere, you're only 100 bucks shy of being able to afford Final Cut Studio, which not only includes Final Cut as your primary editing software, but several other programs you'll probably want.
Comparable to the Final Cut Studio bundle, is Adobe's "Production Premium" package, which runs $1699 new or $599 for the upgrade, which may be the better option for any serious editor. With that you'll get the CS5 versions of Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, After Effects, Media Encoder, Soundbooth, Illustrator, On Location, Flash, & more. Granted you're getting a lot more production software here than found in Final Cut Studio, but it's also about $700 more.
Going into the aforementioned "corny music video project," I figured it would take twice as long to put together as it actually did… I would have been stuck rendering things out over and over again as I made little adjustments. The fact that this program is 64-bit, and the new Mercury Playback Engine make this beast worth the price of admission.
Go for the Production Premium if you can afford it, as Premiere integrates well with Photoshop and After Effects, which are usually a crucial part of my video projects.
I must say, I absolutely love this program. Premiere CS5 has outdone Final Cut 7 in just about every way. I've been editing for 10 years, and over time have gotten much faster at what I do. It's good to know that finally my editing software can keep up!
