As the other poster said in his links, make sure and try the free demo first, I would say the PLE as it has recently been updated according to e-on with the current patches (it was not before a few weeks ago). It gives you a full working copy of Vue 7 for you to try. However, you can not use any of your saved work according to the pop-up on a real copy of the software meaning that file is tied to the PLE. Also, you will get overlays on your images rendered large size with "e-on". I can't recall if that was from the first day or after 30 days but it is there so you can't use it to do renders and export the images.

As to learning, I too will fully admit I didn't start using it until about 4 months ago in full earnest. It's not REAL hard to pick up and there are some GREAT videos to help. Like anything else, you just have to dig into it. I would HIGHLY recommend both AsileFX and GeekAtPlay as they do top queality video tutorials and you learn a lot from them. Vue has good community support with those two companies.

Links:

tinyurl.com/clje2d

tinyurl.com/c4wty3

Good luck and happy rendering.

Jeff

Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.