Customer Reviews

Pinnacle Studio 9 Upgrade from Previous Version

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I was excited to upgrade from Studio 8 to Studio 9, but in doing so, most of the original transitions that I had were now considered "pro" or "pro plus". I also find this program harder to use instead of easier. I tried to contact the Pinnacle people but never received a response. I don't understand how a company can take away something that I already had on a previous version. I plan on uninstalling 9 and reinstalling 8 to see if I can get all my original transitions back. Even my previous movies now have watermarks of "Pro" or "Pro Plus" on them! Another example of Company Greed! Don't waste your money.

I've gone through hell with version 8, although for a brief time I was able to work around the problems and cut a DVD that actually worked. But the lastest (and last) "upgrade" of v8 hangs whenever I use a DVD menu - any menu. Other users are reporting the same.

Support is non-existent because it's "automated" and no help at all. Worst of all is the absence of any mention whatsoever of many common problems on their site - so you think you're alone in this problem and it must be your fault and you kill yourself trying to work a bug that you simply aren't going to get around. Many people can't get a DVD out at all with the v9, and are sadly waiting for a new version.

I say: Boycott Pinnacle code until they clean it up, respond to technical problems, and admit unresolved problems on their site. An apology to current users would be a fair thing to do also.

Pity - it had so much promise. But if you think they're going to clean up v9 before releasing a buggier v10, you're dreaming.

The STUDIO 9 upgrade is riddled with problems. I have had STUDIO 8 for some time and it worked fine so I upgraded to STUDIO 9 and the installation problems are a nightmare to start with (although I eventually got it installed), then there are the patches they put out which makes it almost impossible to add CD music to your video. You now have to rip CD music as .wav files and add them through the sound effects icon instead of the add CD feature which worked well with STUDIO 8.
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Good Luck if you get the upgrade!!!! I would wait until the bugs are ironed out.

We upgraded from Studio 8 to 9 ... we made over 20 DVDs with Studio 8...We have burned one DVD and one VCD with Studio 9. The only problem we have had with Studio 9 is that the video CDs will not play with the Windows Media 9 player in the computer. The Studio 8 VCDs play OK ... there is a bug in the Studio 9 VCD software and several users are having this same problem. Pinnacle does not want to acknowledgee that there is a problem. We are are waiting for the fix before we burn any more VCDs.

I am happy that Robert Wright has had such good luck with Pinnacle Studio. I have not and, judging by reviews at places like ZDNet, the kind of problems I have had are more typical.

The project I am struggling with now is just under 40 minutes long. It has 303 scenes in the story board, most of which are from 5 to 20 seconds in length. Simply loading the project hangs the system. I started it yesterday and waited. And waited. And waited. After 12 hours the project still had not loaded. The WinXP Task Manager said Studio.exe was using 99% of the CPU. It takes nearly 7 minutes (each time) to kill the program. I can make Studio 8 hang every time simply by selecting "open project."

I have tried splitting the large project into smaller projects. Whatever causes the problem was propagated into the smaller projects. Three of four hang my system. The PC I am using is a 2.6GHz Intel Celeron with 1gig memory and two 80gig hard drives, running WinXP Home SP1. This configuration is far above Pinnacle's minimum configuration.

It is entirely possible that the type of editing that Mr. Wright is doing does not invoke the many bugs I keep running into. I seriously encourage people considering buying anything from Pinnacle Systems to search a bit and read user reviews before making a decision. It may save them the time and money I seem to have wasted on Pinnacle Systems.

Check out Pinnacle's customer support forum BEFORE buying this software. Tech support is saying "we will be fixing the installation and ops problems in version 9.1.... but we have no idea when that will be released." The other reviewers are right on. This is a company that knows how to sell, then sell extra "features", upgrade you like crazy (read: nickle and dime you), and then say "oh too bad" when their product fails miserably. Save your money. Buy something else.

I spent $150 on Studio 8 and the Dazzle 150. The box - and salesman at CompUsa - indicated this was the easiest package to burn discs from my old VHS home videotapes. Well, one week, about 30 hours, and a lot of wasted DVD's later... I'M TAKING IT BACK. Turns out there are a host of well-documented problems in the software/hardware that make it almost impossible to accomplish my simple task: most notably, there are constant synch problems between audio and video. The software makes it very easy to access the Pinnacle helpsite and a message board for the product; believe me, I'm not the only one having the problem. It became apparent that this is a huge glitch that Pinnacle is aware of... but only addresses by saying the problem will be addressed in "future versions." Meanwhile, I - and you, if you buy this product - are screwed. Reading the boards shows that others have resorted to a lot of workarounds, involving downloading different programs to do much of the work Studio 8 claims it can handle. Bottom line, no one seems to like it. Look elsewhere!!!

First off, I'm about to buy Studio 9 Media Suite after having used both Studio 7 and Studio 8. My experience is that all of them are buggy, but in some respects that is not surprising given the impressive capabilities of the product. Other editors don't come close to the performance. I'm not saying the program is perfect, but I learned painfully how Studio can hang; here's how I worked around it.

I was the parent support to a group of high schoolers putting together a sports team video almost three years ago. The final version ran 32 minutes and 4.7 GB, with about ten different music tracks, about 30 video clips, and almost 300 pictures, all with special effects, titles, etc. The end product was really impressive, but the project wouldn't render. Parents had paid their money. Kids were getting ready to go away to college. I knew that Studio 7 wouldn't handle anything bigger than 4.0 GB, so I had to splice two projects onto the master (seamless with a digital camcorder).

But first I had to get it to render. On the Pinnacle web site I read someone's comment about hanging often being due to heavily edited projects - you know, adding and cutting a frame here or a frame there to get the perfect transition? So here's what I did. I printed out the storyboard/timeline data as an Excel file. It gave me all of the clips, all of the start and stop times, all of the transitions - everything I needed to to reconstruct the project. I then went back to the raw files and carefully edited them one time, using the storyboard data, and inserting them into two new projects for the two project segments. Disclaimer - downloading and printing the storyboard data was not obvious in Studio 7; I have suggested this to Pinnacle as a desirable feature but couldn't tell you if it's happened.

The entire thing then rendered perfectly on a system running an Athlon 900 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM, a Radeon 7500 video card, and 120 GB HDD space. A project like that will stress ANY system and may take hours to render, but it will work. I recommend no multitasking or background processes while rendering. I think I even disconnected my ethernet cable and shut down the antivirus and firewall.

Pinnacle Studio is very much like a British sports car - incredibly finicky, but incredible performance when it's right.

I've recently upgraded from Studio 8 to version 9 and have been pretty pleased. As yet, I've only had one lockup. (while searching the help.) My projects have been a mix of analog capture in AVI and MPEG2 files, as well as DV. These have had a number of effects in some cases, some clips were shortened, and I've played with the DVD menu structure. (basic stuff) The output from a burned DVD appears pretty good for the price. However, I haven't tackled any large projects yet. With Studio 8 I've captured 2 hour movies from TiVo, created menus/chapters, then burned them to DVD. I mention this because there would ocassionally be a A/V sync problem after some scene transistions. The 16:9 support is nice, but frame conversions are weak. Conversion of 4:3 to widescreen simply squashes the frame - distorting everything. Some other options like screen cropping would be nice, or allowing mixed formats in the same project. If you only use one format, then it's not an issue.

Other than those points, my complaint would be the inclusion of locked-out features. I'd rather not install something I can't/won't use. Like SPAM on my PC I cannot control. Oh, and the S/N included wasn't valid - oops! Service emailed me another in about 12 hours.

In general, check that your PC can handle the software, and is stable - it appears to demand more than Studio 8. I'd suggest browsing the manufacture discussion forums (Pinnacle) to see what the common issues are, and how to resolve them. Finally, all software has bugs - so if you grab the first copy - expect many patches (or simply wait a few months.) ps. the latest patch was ~50Mb

I upgraded to Studio 9 several weeks ago and used it to render a large project. I took over 15 hours of event video and reduced it to a 1 hour DVD. I'm working on a Dell 1.5Ghz Workstation, with 256Meg of RAM (more on order), and 300+Gigabytes of disk storage.
Here was my experience.
No problems with installation. It uninstalled Studio 8 and reinstalled Studio 9 without a hitch. I then downloaded the 9.0.2 upgrade and update without any issues.
I was able to capture some 15 hours of raw video (about 17 13Gigabyte AVI files) without any problems. The video came from both Digital 8 and Mini-DV cameras both of which Studio 9 handled well. I really liked the record in reduced mode option which was a nice way to reduce disk usage. Working with this many files and data was no problem for Studio 9. I jumped around between the files and sucessfully built the storyboard. I ended up with around 240 clips and transistions in the final video. Towards the end things got really sluggish, especially when editing audio, and I would have to patiently wait for Studio 9 to "do it's thing" before adding or editing the next clip but it never hung or core dumped. However, I did find myself just quiting the program on occasion to clean up memory and speed things up a bit.
Where I did find real problems was in the Effects area, both audio and visual. I tried to use the Stabalize effect on some jerky video and had some initial success. When I then tried to apply it across numerous jerky shots it actually made the video considerably worse. And it was a cumulative effect. The more shots that were sequenced together the worse the effect was. I removed that effect on most of the shots and used it sparingly on the worse offenders and that worked ok.
In the audio effects I had a similiar experience. I had a whole string of outdoor shots with people and lots of wind noise. I tried using the Wind reduction effect on a single clip and it reduced wind sound. So then I applied it to the entire 20 shot sequence. Bad idea. Now I can't render the movie. Each time it gets into that section Studio 9 stops rendering. It doesn't freeze Studio 9 it just stops rendering - sitting on the same frame for hours. I am able to kill the render but each time I retry it does the same thing. I finally suspect that it is the Noise reduction code, remove it from the 20 shot sequence and everything now renders fine.
I did find one area that will hang up Studi 9 every time. That was in selecting effects. If I looked at several effects (like stabalise, B&W video, fun effect, etc) in sequence, looking for that "right" effect for a shot, it would hang Studio 9 every time. I learned to never look at more than two effects in sequence before exiting the effects area. Eventually I knew what effect Studio 9 had and then could just go straight to the desired effect and apply it to a scene. This worked with no problems.
Last area of frustration was mentioned already by another reviewer - adding CD Music. I finally figured out the correct sequence for making it work but only after several hours of frustration. It defaults to placing all CD Music inserts to the front of the timeline even though you started with the cursor on the time tick where you want the music to go. The secret is to reset the cursor to the desired input frame immediatly before hitting the add-music button. Then it will work elsewise it stuffs the music at the head of timeline. WIth a big project this becomes a major nuisance to drag the music back to the correct time mark.
Those were the four big issues I had, none of which stopped me in my tracks. I have not reported these to Studio 9 support yet because, given my experience from 8.0, their answer will be "reload the software" or some other completly meaningless answer.
My overall evaluation is positive and I will continue to work with it though I look anxiously for the 9.1 upgrade. It makes working with video and audio clips very easy. We were able to pull off some pretty fancy tricks with this software.
It does have a lot of power for a $100 software package and in the end it worked well for me.