Thanks all for the comments!
Certainly took the opportunity to use a couple effects for fun that you'd normally avoid. For early August in Texas the weather was unbelievable with highs only in the mid-80's. Beautiful day for riding. There was no "knee dragging" in our group but probably a little "peg scraping" especially among the cruisers. The BMW group I was with welcomes all bikes and bikers so I was at home on my Kawasaki along with riders on Hondas, Yamahas, and Harleys as well.
Alas, the video quality is mostly a product of my own ignorance I fear. Even though the GoPro footage was very nice 720p HD in a .mp4 file, while the files play ok in my PE-7, once I added a simple effect or transition playback becomes very uneven and jerky, too much to allow for effective editing. Think I even tried converting the .mp4 file to a 720p HD .avi file but had the same problem. I match all but one of the minimum system reqs for HD editing listed in the Muvipix PE-7 guide: Intel dual-core CPU (T6400) at 2GHz, 8GB RAM, and a 7200RPM 4TB external disk drive connected via eSATA. Have redirected all of PE7's scratch disks to the new drive. The only thing I'm missing is an ATI or nVidia graphics accelerator but my system does have an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (4500MHD) but don't know much about it. Maybe it's the graphics card, just don't know. In the meantime, I have to convert the GoPro 720P HD .mp4 files to 720x480 (16:9) .avi files which is what I edit with. The output is rendered by PE7 to an NTSC-DVD Widescreen 720x480 .mpg file which is the file I upload to Youtube. Don't know what if anything Youtube does in the way of conversions or compression in the process, but think PE7's .mpg file looks a little better than the Youtube version, but not much.
Any advice on the above "quality" issue would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again for the comments!
Todd