Customer Reviews

Pinnacle Studio 9 AV/DV

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

It seems like this is a "love it or hate it" product, based on a lot of what I've read on the internet. Well, I supposed I'm one of the Pinnacle Studio AV/DV users who loves the product. The hardware is fine for my uses; I'm capturing analog video from a Hi8 camera to my hard drive and editing home movies to burn to DVD. I've done a couple of movies on DVD since I got this product and I have to say that the finished product looks as good as my original Hi8 tapes. Plus, the software is GREAT! I'd call myself a sophomore level user of audio/video editing software and Pinnacle Studio lets me do everything I had hoped it would and more. Fancy edits, fades, jump-cuts, a few fun special effects, basically more than I'll ever use is included. I understand that many people have problems using the software, but it works great on my Windows XP 2ghz Dell Dimension. I capture and edit my movies with this software and burn the DVDs with another program, and I consider this product to be a steal, so consider this a rave review.

I bought this 1 week ago and it works well. I've made 6 DVDs from old video tapes already.

I bought an excellent MPC Millenia 910i computer capable of using this package in November, mostly to get SVHS home videos onto DVD, and was scared to buy Studio with AV capability because of the Amazon and other reviews, and by the many complaints on the Pinnacle forum.

I've had problems from tape anomalies. The package has crashed, but Studio 9 and the AVDV board seem not to have introduced problems. I'm pretty sure that many of the complaints are from people with less (or less well designed) computers than my MPC (2.6GHz, 512MB, 120GB single hard drive, XP).

Pinnacle's staff seems to have been stung by the previous "lousy support" comments. They seem to be trying to fix problems.
There have been two patches since Studio 9 came out -- it probably won't work without them for some people.

As I watch the files eat up hard drive I think how ambitious the making of videos is. I can't have anything else running and I throw away old disk files and defragment the hard drive before every big session. I wish I had two drives.

Studio 9 makes editing easy, although I read the manual a lot to learn the many features. I'm working as hard as the computer, but doing this work with Studio 9 is very enjoyable.

I'm very stingy with 5 star ratings, but this product deserves it. First the hardware: the board and its driver were a snap to install. You'll only have a problem if you're uncomfortable opening up the computer to put the card in a PCI slot. Otherwise, you're home free. The board itself has digital and analog (both RCA and S-VHS) inputs. As for the Studio 9 software, it is very easy to use; I was able to able to start doing basic stuff within 15 minutes of finishing the install, and have been able to easily pick up more advanced techniques as I've gone along. The finished DVDs look pretty sharp, with menus and various types of transitions. As a result, I've been able to combine my pile of VHS-C tapes into edited DVDs. The program doesn't have the power and controls of Adobe Premiere, but Premiere is aimed at professional videographers and lists at $699. Studio 9 is for non-professionals. The closest thing I can compare it to for ease of use is Easy CD Creator 5, before Roxio tried to make it a media swiss army knife. Creator 5 was brilliantly designed for ease of use, but Media Creator 7 tries to do too many things and ends up a mess (I've uninstalled it and gone back to 5). Like Creator 5, Studio 9 has a good, clear manual included if you have any questions (and you won't have many). As a book of tips for advanced uses of the program and shooting video, "Visual Quickstart Guide to Studio 9" by Jan Ozer is pretty good, but for the basics, the manual included with this product does the trick. Here's the proof: I bought this three months ago, and I have yet to call tech support. Updating a year later (6/1/05): I still give it five stars. I've gotten more into the features and power of this, and it's amazing what this product will do. Example: on a tape I recorded, the video went south for about 30 seconds, while the audio was OK all the way through. As this was a band performance, just taking out the bad section would be junky. BUT -- Studio lets you lock the audio so it is not affected by what you do to the video (the reverse is also possible). As a result, I was able to (1) edit out the bad video, (2) screen capture several stills from the good video, (3) drop those stills into the spot where I took out the bad video, and (4) put dissolves between them. Result: live action that dissolves to a series of stills from the performance and then back to the live action -- all without touching the audio track in any way. Then I burned it to DVD. Final note: I have still never had to call tech support. It's all there in the manual and the Ozer book.

I have to say that the product does work. In fact, it works pretty well, but because the manual doesn't really cover a lot of the basic problems in setting up the card and the program, I recommend caution in buying this product. If you have computer knowledge and certain degree of perseverance, this is for you. If you get intimidated by changing windows system settings, monkeying around in your device manager and cleaning your registry, you might want to think twice.

On the plus side, the firewire capture worked very well the first time and its pretty easy to do. The analog capture is more difficult to get figured out, but it works well too once you're set up correctly. You'd better have a lot of hard drive space - like an extra 20 gig for a 90 minute video.

I had to contact technical support on a couple of relatively minor issues and found out that technical support is pretty bad. You can get support via email (you need to have your serial number handy to do this). I don't recommend going this route, however, because it's a 24 hour turn-around for each question and response. And the responses are awful -- just quotes from the manual. "Make sure all background programs are closed." "Make sure your chipset drivers are updated." "Make sure you defrag your hard drive..." It goes on and on. And they won't give you a substantive answer until you promise you have done all of the "stock" things that the manual already tells you to do. I'm on day 4 with email tech support over a green line that showed up on one of my captured videos. The tech support person keeps giving me one more little "task" to do before he will address the issue of why there is a line on one video capture but not others. Email support is abysmal in its helpfulness.

Telephone support, on the other hand, isn't bad. I would like to give you the technical support telephone number, but its against Amazon's rules. That's a shame, I could have saved you 20 minutes because that's how long it will take you to find it. From what I can tell you get your first call free and they want $30 for all subsequent calls. Ouch! That hurts, especially when the manual doesn't tell you how to actually capture video using the S-video connector. (You've got to make a change to a setting at an odd place in the software and its not addressed in the manual or in the help file that comes with the product.)

My bottom line is that the product works, but you have to be ready to take your lumps on the technical support side. I've transferred a couple of home videos from MiniDV format as well as a kid's vhs tape for use as a svcd. I'm happy with both. Now that I'm past the initial learning curve, I hope I can enjoy the product more. If you're the faint of heart type or don't have a bunch of computer experience, this product is probably not for you. Once its up and running you're fine, but there is a lot of "tweaking" required to get to that point and you can't expect much help from Pinnacle.

Video editing is a little more complex than one thinks.

Video and audio will go out of sync no matter what software you will use. What happens is that quartz clock on sound card fluctuates in frequency. More expensive sound cards are more expensive for a reason. Those sound cards have better components and sync problem is minimized (not eliminated) resulting in smaller audio video sync problem. One can notice audio sampling rate fluctuations when capturing video in great program called virtualdub (virtualdub.org). It happens to be free.

Using sampling rates when capturing video is also important. My sound card works better using 48kHz than 44.1kHz sampling rate.

Operating System is important too. Windows 98SE (I assume the same applies to ME) is not suited well for video capture because audio video sync problems were the worst by far. Same hardware, same applications running on Windows 2000 rendered much better results. XP behaves as well as W2K. If this is just driver issue or not - this is another issue, which I cannot confirm. I am leaning though on opinion that OS made such a difference. Win98SE(ME) is not true operating system such as Linux, Unix, Windows 2000/XP/NT (computer science graduates will agree with me knowing those OS internals - I am talking about kernel here).

Solution:
Don't capture video in huge chunks. I usually record maximum 20 minutes. I stop capturing when new scene starts. I rewind a little bit before this scene and start capturing (this will result in seperate capture file).

I also prefer using NTFS file system (2000,XP), which allows me to have huge capture files (larger than 4GBs).
I compress using Huffyuv codec (almost lossless compression). It shrinks file size by 2.2 factor. Capturing 720x480 without compression will bring any HD to its knees resulting in dropped frames. Defragmenting HD is also important before capturing. I have devoted partition for video capturing. Some people have separate HD just for capturing (I cannot justify this luxury).

I own Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which gives me good results. Before Santa Cruz, I had Philips Seismic Edge sound card and it was pretty good (slightly worse than Turtle Beach though - but I paid less).

By the way, there are forums devoted to video editing. Lots of knowledge and help is there (check vcdhelp.com).

I owned older version of Pinnacle and it worked fine. I had some issues with my AMD XP system using Pinnacle capture card. Fortunately, I was able to find fix to this problem on some of video forums. One guy from Germany, put some registry fix.

Pinnacle demands you use XP Service Pack 1 before it even installs itself. If you've been updating your XP regularly like you should, you'll be using Service Pack 2. You would think that wouldn't be a problem, but with Pinnacle it is! As stated on their customer service site, they don't "support" the current version. I had to DOWNGRADE my XP to use this, and I bought this off the store just today! What kind of tech company is this? I have to make my system vulnerable by using an obsolete security update just to record a video!

Recently purchased a Dell Dimension 3000 with a Celeron "D" 2.4 MHZ processor, 512M...ill advised, I know, but I didn't realize the mistake until the product had been delivered. Rather than scrap it and send it back to reorder, I thought at least give it a shot....I ordered a new computer specifically for video and editing. Then I ordered this product, Pinnacle Studio 9 AV/DV (from Servemart for $74 bucks + shipping), and was concerned with whether or not my system would be able to handle it.

After receiving the product, I had the PCI card and software installed within an hour...and later that evening, I had successfully transferred my video to DVD without any trouble...and I didn't even open the manual.

My primary purpose for buying this product was to create DVD versions of my home movies...all those tapes cause quite a clutter, and some of the older ones are slowly degrading. I did try some of the transitions, and other effects, and though I might use them in the future, I have yet to render a project using them. Rendering didn't take any longer than I expected...without the effects, I burned a high quality DVD in just under an hour.

My only complaint at this time is having to constantly "unlock" features by visiting the website...different features require a "key" to use..some are free, others are not. So, occasionally, you'll encounter a feature that's free, and you'll have to visit the website to get the key, which slows down your work, until you get the feature unlocked..seems that the original product key should've done that, but I suppose Pinnacle wanted you to visit their website, just to let you know it's there...

Overall, though, I'm very satisfied with the product...

****Update: Today I burned my first DVD using some of the additional features and transitions, and I experienced NO additional burn time for making DVD's...an 80 minute home movie, complete with transistions, titles and menus took approximately 50 minutes to burn with my system...though, I do recommend deleting all finished projects and defragmenting the harddrive before beginning a new project.

The capture card works fine but this has to be some of the most poorly designed editing software I've ever seen (and I've seen a few packages). SAVE OFTEN!
My most recent project was tranferring home movies I had originally on Super 8 into the computer (Dell 1.8 G, 512K RAM). The music used by the video house that did the transfer was Kenny G. Awful. So I wanted to add my own music to my edit movies (the reels were out of sequence so I was using 9 to reorganize them chronologically. Editing went well in fact everything went well up until I wanted to add my own music. You have three choices for sound: 1) Voice over via microphone. 2) CD 3) corny cheesy MIDI music that comes with 9. Awful!
I tried several times to add CD tracks, the program would dutifully go off for several minutes "adding" the track then promptly crash and close out. I gave up after four or five tries.
Thank goodness I had Ulead software to finally pull it all together.
In addition to the above problem, Pinnacle nickels and dimes its customers. Features are locked out and you have to purchase them in addition to the $99 you just spent. You also have to register online to get any MPEG 2 functionality but it doesn't say that on the box.
Don't expect much help at the website either.

--I also had sync problems when capturing using their software. One of the other reviewers made the claim that all software will go out of sync because of cheap soundcards. This is not so. I use Ulead's suite of programs (I use a Soundblaster soundcard) to capture and I have had none of the sync problems I had with the Pinnacle software. It's something in the software causing it, not the hardware. I plan to upgrade my capture hardware and software later this year and would not consider another Pinnacle product

I bought a AverMedia EZMaker DVD PCI card and was disappointed with the quality... the price was great, but video where the camera was in motion (panning left to right, for example) was very pixellated. The NeoDVD software that came with it was horrible; it dropped frames so all my videos looked like the scary part from "The Ring". Using Roxio's Easy DVD Creator software was better, but still pixelated.
So I took a chance and bought Pinnacle Systems Studio AV/DV 9 from the local Best Buy ($10.00 more than the Amazon price, but I figured I could return it easier if I wasn't happy with the quality.)
The picture is DVD-perfect.. I can't complain at all, it just looks great. The Studio 9 software that comes with it is awesome, full-featured enough for professional movies, it seems to me. The only complaint I could possibly make is the rendering speed. I have a medium-quality system (1.1GHz with 512M RAM) and a top quality Video card (ATI Radeon Pro) and rendering a half hour of mixed video to DVD takes well over an hour and a half. Burning the finished product to DVD takes about 15-20 minutes. But even the time is not a big deal; I just set it to burn before I go to bed and when I wake up it's done.
I had absolutely no problems with installation or setup, it was up and running in less than 20 minutes. Be warned that video editting is a HardDrive HOG. The Studio 9 software came on a CD and a DVD. An hour's worth of video takes up many GiGs of drive space!
So the Pinnacle Systems Studio AV/DV 9 card works great, and the software alone is worth the price.

I spent several weeks trying to get this product to work and finally gave up. Technical support, as many have indicated, is a joke. It took them 12 days to respond to my first email. After that it was a response every 2 days. Basically, my system never recognized the card. Windows never popped up the New Hardware dialog, and there was nothing under device manager. I uninstalled everything and tried the install again, but no luck. I downloaded patches, and new drivers, but nothing worked. Mean while, tech support was just sending me canned answers, and not even reading my emails. If you look at the chat on pinnacles web site, there are a lot of frustrated users trying to make this product work. There is also a lot of talk about how the product does not work correctly with XP Service Pack 2.