I've used Pinnacle Studio 8 now for over a year and it has worked fine. It is a good option for those who can't afford the more pricey editors. It has all the basics you need to put together nice productions.
Pinnacle used to be very buggy and crash-prone, but the latest patches have improved this significantly. I still occasionally run into problems with Pinnacle when I'm assembling a long video with many clips, transitions, titles and soundtracks - but this can be worked around mainly by saving frequently so you can backtrack to the action that caused the problem. Also, doing your video in multiple ten-minute chapters, rendered and edited separately (rather than doing the entire hour-long production in one big file), helps cut down on the errors and crashes. Once you're done, you just assemble the finished 'chapters' and do the final render from there.
I bought a 60GB hard drive and have come to discover that this isn't sufficient for a full-length (60 minute) video when I did my 2003 chase highlights video. I had to delete many source captures so that the final DVD would render, meaning that I couldn't go back and re-edit once I had the final movie done. I like to keep frequently-used captures (lightning, floods, tornadoes, etc.) archived for easy access and for backup, and these are currently using 30GB of space as it is. I definately won't have room for the 2004 chase highlight video with the space I have now.
You may need at least an 80GB drive if you're going to do any serious video work, the more the better. I'm going to have to get a new drive as soon as I can afford it, hopefully a firewire drive that I can use on both my laptop and desktop.
yes each hour of video footage is 13 gig of space. 
