Customer Reviews

Pinnacle Studio MovieBox Deluxe 9.0 [USB 2.0] [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I have some VCR tapes that I wanted to copy, edit and burn to DVD. I contacted Dell Computers to seek their advice on what I should purchase to accomplish this task. They recommended the Pinnacle MovieBox 9.0-USB. I naturally went to Amazon to read reviews. Needless to say, the reviews were pretty bad. But, the one thing that I kept reading was that people with machine configurations slightly better than minimum requirements were having problems. Since I just purchased a new computer from Dell (Dimension 8400, 3.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 160 GB HD), I assumed that I my configurations were more than adequate to accomplish the task. I purchased the Pinnacle MovieBox Deluxe 9.0-USB.

After receiving the moviebox and software, I couldn't be more pleased. This hardware/software performs exactly as described and I couldn't be happier. I was able to capture my VCR tapes flawlessly, edit like a professional and burn to DVD without any problems.

I have read the complaints about Pinnacle and I'll address this in two stages: the first being computer related and the second is the users themselves.
The most common computer related issue is TURN OFF Norton Antivirus -- Pinnacle and Norton and not quite compatible. I don't know why, but this is from personal experience. However, I disconnect from the internet using my firewall so I have no distractions when I edit. Another commom computer problem is you have to have a lot of RAM memory. At least twice the recommended or a MINIMUM of 512 MB DDRAM and 10GB of hard disk space is very good. Also, use XP Pro or Linux or Mac when using this software -- you need a sturdy system with resources dedicated to video.
The second area I will address is users themselves. Pinnacle is marketed to consumers, but it is most useful to small businesses (private studios, high end consumers, etc) who cannot afford full Avid systems. There are many features that are available that someone who is trained in editing will know how to use. For copying home movies from VHS to DVD there are other lower end software packages. But, if you want to really edit and cut and paste and add effects and you have a limited budget, this is the software to buy.

I was hesitant to buy this based on the other reviews but then Maximum PC Magazine said it was just fine. I got a $70 rebate for it so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm happy to report Pinnacle Studio MovieBox Deluxe 9.0 [USB 2.0] works just as advertised. I have never done any video conversion or editing before nor have I ever burned a video DVD before. This product made it easy.

I hooked up my VCR to the device and the film copied right in without a hitch on my first try. I did some minor editing in Studio and created a somewhat complex menu for the video. I then exported to a low-res mpeg that ran just great on Windows Media Player and then burned a high-res image to DVD. The DVD plays in both of my home DVD players and even works on a Mac. Quality of the DVD was as good as the VHS tape.

Overall I have not had any hiccups, crashes, or other problems over a half dozen conversions. Well one issue: on one video import that I edited the sound on the first chapter is very choppy when you preview it. Once I exported it out to an actual movie the sound was fine. But other than that I have had no trouble making VHS to DVD conversions with light editing.

I do have a very solid PC setup with lots of RAM and disk space. RAM seems less important as I haven't seen the program use more than a few hundred megabytes. If you have at least 768MB of RAM you should be fine (can't say what the requirements would be if you did lots of sound editing or transitions). Free disk space is crucial. Plan on having at least 5GB of disk space free for every hour of video you want to convert. Multiple disks also help where you can have the program on one disk and the video files writing to another. I also updated all of the drivers and firmware for the various devices before starting.

Previous reviewers mentioned choppy video. I have not had the problem but one thing to remember is that you can't record Hollywood movies that are copy protected. This will result in all kinds of lousy import issues. If you are trying to convert home movies or unprotected movies it should work fine. I'd also guess at least a 3Ghz P4 as the minimum processor for DVD quality video. I think the box says 2.2Ghz as the MINIMUM needed for DVD quality.

If you have a good PC I'd say give this product a try. It worked for me.

Being on a fairly tight budget, I researched the @�% out of the various video capture / editing products that are "out there". I visited just about every website on the net that offers reviews on these products. Do I choose a system that uses an internal card, or not? What about the editing program that is bundled with the internal / external capture device? (We have several shoeboxes of 8mm video of our kids that we want to convert to digital, edit, then burn to dvd)

The Pinnacle Studio 9 Moviebox (USB) system appealed to me because we have 3 computers on a wireless network (teenagers, you know!) and this machine would be portable, and could easily be moved from computer to computer. Then, I began to read the reviews people had posted re: the Pinnacle Studio 9 Moviebox ...
... so many said it was "trash" ... etc. ... but some said it was "great, and worked well". My local computer store had them on sale for about $ 70 (U.S.) with a 30 day return policy. How could I go wrong ?

I've used it for about 3 weeks now, and made several DVD's. The video capture is superb ... very fast. The layout is also really good. Everything you need is at your fingertips ... just click & drag, click & drag ... I did all of this on a PC that doesn't have a dedicated video card, I might add. Yes, it was slower. I had to wait a few seconds each time I did something so my PC could catch up ... but what do you expect? It never once crashed or froze, and the DVD's burned perfectly. The end result looked great and impressed my kids ... titles, fades in/out, music, voiceover ... and I'm just getting into it.

When my budget can handle it, I'm going to install a graphics card (probably an ATI Radeon 9600XT 256mb) and an Audigy 2 sound card. That will obviously speed things up and take the load off my integrated video/sound motherboard. (Forgot to mention, the PC I've been using is an HP Pavilion a420n ... AMD Athlon 3000+
(2.16 Ghz), 512 mb ram, and a 160 GB hard drive)

Summary: Pinnacle Studio 9 Moviebox (USB) is a really good system and I just don't understand why some people "trashed" it in their reviews on other websites. Truth be known, you'll like this system. It works very well & has all the features you'd ever want. It does not (repeat, not) "crash your computer". It does not (repeat, not) "freeze after 16 frames" (there's a patch to download from Pinnacles website ... it takes all of 20 seconds to dl it, and it deals effectively with that complaint). I like this product and I am very happy I bought it.

I got this to transfer my VHS tapes to DVD format before VHS players were no longer sold. The problem is that video recording is computationally intense. You will get jerky video if you overload the processor.

My 1.86 GHz computer was able to capture in best quality MPEG for black and white and best quality avi for color source material after I had done the following things:

There are two things not mentioned in the directions that you have to do. When capturing from tape you have to check the VCR box to prevent the video from wobbling left and right. The other is that you have to have the capture device and your external drive on different interfaces, one on USB and the other on FireWire. Otherwise you will overload the USB or the FireWire buss controller and get jerky recordings. Use the test drive button to find which buss has the higher write speed on your drive. If your external drive has nothing on it you want and if you are technically skilled you can do a quick format on it with different sector sizes to find the highest write speed setting.

With slower computers you have to disable the preview option. You will also have to disconnect from the network and shut down all programs shown in the system tray including Norton Antivirus. It is best to do a virus sweep with the latest definitions before disabling Norton. Then make test recordings from color and black and white tapes. Start with best quality and then watch the results on the edit tab to look for jerky motion. Try both recording options, avi and mpeg. If both cause jerky motions, try the better option. Then go to custom and adjust the quality % to the highest level that does not have jerky motion.

The advantage of mpeg capture is that it takes less room on the hard drive and makes the third tab make movie processing time shorter. The extra storage space is of no real advantage if you do not intend to permanently store the files after you have burnt your DVD. The shortened time in the third tab is no real advantage if you have to do the capture at a lower quality setting.

Then on the make movie tab select make file to be burnt later. Then select the burn from stored file to do the DVD recording. Select the external drive for this option or you will get 10 GB of files left on your internal drive that you will have to manually delete if you need the room.

If you have a 3+ GHz machine you can use preview, best quality capture and burn the disk while making the movie.

Then there was a quirk of my Dell 9300 of its accessing the internal drive several times a minute which caused jerky motion. To overcome this I had to boot the computer with the peripherals disconnected, wait until the boot is finished, and then connect them one at a time. Then I had to wait 30 minutes while the computer did the internal bookkeeping and accessed the internal drive. After the 30 minutes this stopped. Then start the Pinnacle software. One quirk of the software is that it only recognizes devices that are running when the program starts, so you have to have your external DVD burner (if you use one) and external hard drive attached to the computer and powered before starting the Pinnacle software.

My system is a 3.2GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. First time I used it I couldn't capture audio along with video. Upgraded from 9.0 to 9.4.3 which fixed audio problem but I was losing capture after 16 frames. Found patch for just this problem and applied it. In capture settings could not find description of VCR check box option and this cost me an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn't capture.

Finally got capture working and it worked beautifully. Then when went to render movies I kept hitting scenes that "stuck" - audio continued but video froze. I would delete the scenes causing the video freeze to get around it. Finally got good quality AVI and MPEG movies from analog camcorder video.

Next day I restarted system, started video feed playing and preview screen in Studio shows video and plays audio. I click Capture and the preview goes blank. I've restarted Studio, unplugged Movie Box Deluxe, tried toggling the settings per Pinnacle's suggestions but cannot now capture video. Nothing has changed on my set up.

Can you tell I'm frustrated? When it worked it produced high quality video but it's too flaky to use. Try another product, it can't be any worse.

*THIS REVIEW IS FOR THE REGULAR STUDIO 9 MOVIE BOX USB*
The difference between the two seems to be a few more options in the software (I'm guessing it's stuff that Pinncale tries to get you to buy after installing the regular version!) Otherwise they are the same.
I purchased this THING at Best Buy after getting gift cards from Mother-In-Law and my wife with the explicit directions that I was to get some form of video capture and editing for all the Hi8 videos of our 11 month old daughter. I really wish she had asked me before she did this... I would have told her to make sure that I can get something for my Mac, not for the PC. Anyway, I got the box home and began to install it. The software took a while but finally loaded and my PC recognized the device. Hooked up the camcorder, made sure all the settings were right (file storage, file type, etc) and pressed play on the camcorder. I noticed that the video and audio were very choppy in preview. I wrote it of as processing time. After capture (loooooooooong time!) I checked the file and played it in preview... audio and video still choppy, @%*& thing droppd frames! Grrrr.
Tried it again, a little better. Tried to use the software to edit this video I had finally (after two days for two hours of video) captured. Crash! Rre-open software try again, Crash! Silly me! I actually thought I would be able to use my software to edit the video that I captured! What was I thinking!?!
Studio 9 would not even recognize the video clips made on my Sony CyberShot. The software insisted that they were in PAL format!
I had also tried to use the Dazzle DC80, same results! Same waste of time!
I returned everything to Best Buy and tried to get them to give me the return amount back on my credit card. Unfortunately because the items were bought on gift cards they could not refund the money to me. Even after explaining that what I needed (Studio 9 Movie Box DV (Firewire) so that I could use my Mac - the better choice for video editing) So... I was stuck with the gift carsds. I bought the ADT TV Wonder card last night, first 5 hours of video capture so far are great!

I was so looking forward to using this software to capture & edit my video tapes, and put them on DVD. The moviebox & software did okay capturing the video. The editing & adding of chapters also went fairly smooth. But no matter how hard I tried I could not get the software to render my finished project to DVD. I checked pinnacle's online tech support & forums. The only usefull info I could get was I was not the only one having this problem. I decided to return it to the store I purchased it from & take a $43.00 bite (15% repackaging fee & shipping back to store). I'm really not too disgruntled, it was a decent product otherwise. I just thought I'd pass this info along. I'm now looking into Adobe Premiere Elements & some type of capture device or card. We'll see. Good luck to you. I know I'll need it.

When I first bought this I wanted to transfer my old video tapes to DVD. I have a very powerful Dell PC with plenty of RAM and free memory. At first the biggest problem I had was capturing video. Capturing directly from my VCR did not work well at all. The picture was skipping and the screen was distorted. I gave up on trying to transfer old videos and instead tried to copy programs I had recorded on my DVR directly to DVD. This process worked much better although I found that a huge buzzing sound was captured with the video which I still cannot get rid of short of turning the volume on my capture all the way to zero. I burned two DVDs without trouble. Then inexplicably when I tried to create a new project the stupid thing had an error rendering to DVD. I tried everything that Pinnacle support said to do (which I read from user posts because it has been weeks and Pinnacle Tech support has still not answered my email)and the project still encountered an error during rendering. This caused many days of frustration as I tried different settings, recaptures, project recreations until finally, one day it decided to render. The DVD turned out pretty well but for some reason, I can't burn it nor watch the DVD on my computer. I can watch it on my DVD player and wanted to make a copy for my friend but can't. So, I recaptured the video and put it to the same settings that I had it when the project rendered sucessfully. Here we go again. The project encounters and error (by the way, that is the only info you get, a message saying "The project has failed to render to DVD.") I have been going through the process again for days. The people who wrote good reviews for it probably had the same experience I had when I first used the product and it worked. However, try running it a few more times and its inconsistency will drive you mad. It amazes me that a program like that can be so blatently bad. One day it might work. Run the same exact project the next day and it won't. At first my problem was getting a good video capture, but I long for those days because now it is all about the programs refusal to render the video to DVD. It belongs in the garbage.

Needed a method to convert some old VHS and digital videos to DVD's for archival and future family use. This product looked like the solution. I wish. What I found was that the software, at least, and potentially the hardware were not up to the job. First, the software (with the latest 9.4.x update) is very poorly documented, and so one struggles to determine how to use the tools, and what thw workflow should be inside the three "Capture - Edit - Make Movie" steps that are provided. Second, watching the movie as you edit in the preview window I saw a number of times where the video and audio were repeatedly out of sync by a matter of several seconds. Would this show up on the completed movie? I can't tell you because the rendering software required HOURS to render a 50 minute video. I can't tell you how many but I know it would be around 4-5 hours, however in every case the software froze before completing. In one case, it decided after hours of rendering that the video wouldn't fit the DVD-R media when it had told me the 50 minute length would fit the 80 minutes available on the DVD. Technical help in the package is very weak. I have a fairly decent Dell system with 628 MB of memory, and it runs other significantly strenuous software (Photoshop, ProShow Gold, etc.) with no problems. I would have liked to at least gotten one DVD compiled and burned to view the output - that might have provided some motivation for sticking with it, but, I cannot recommend this package to anyone, beginner, intermediate or advanced user.