Pinnacle Systems 210100250 *studio Moviebox Dv

by Pinnacle

Product Details

• Item Weight: 4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000099SXT
• Item model number: 210100250
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 29, 2004

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars PINNACLE S MOVIEBOX DV CAPTURE ( 210100250 ), June 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems 210100250 *studio Moviebox Dv (Personal Computers)

I bought this product to copy old vhs movies and copy my analog camcorder hi 8mm tapes to mpe(dvd) format. Like the other review says, the hardware is a piece of junk and in my opinion should have never been allowed to be sold to the public. It still amazes me how companies get away with this and still stay in business. The software seem ok Pinnacle Studio 8. I have a Dell 8300 running xp pro with sp1 installed, 512 memmory and 200mb harddisk, ati 9800 video card, siig 1394 firewire card. I have a high end sony hi 8mm camcorder. The bottom line is that when you capture video and you have a scene transitions(ex. tape a scene of my kids one day and then next day I tape a nother scene - normal use), it HANGS up(the video goes crazy and it starts making all these popping sounds). My first scene was 5 minutes and then it hung up. I could never get it to capture more than 5 minutes. I tried for hours to make it work and I have 20 years experience as a computer developer. I then started researching this product and found no good reviews, they were all terrible. The moviebox usb is going to have the same problem because of the mpeg encoder chipset in the box, it just does not work. If you want a great production, then the anwser is the Canopus ADVC100(approx $250.00 street price). I bought it the other day and have burned 4 hours of old vhs and hi 8mm movies to the .avi format. You can buy other Canopus products that do mpeg hardware encoding with variable bitrate, but they are in the $500 range. If you want to edit movies, you should be capturing the video to .avi(need a lot of disk space), editing it, and then converting it to mpeg-2(dvd) fromat. Editing in MGEP format does not work well. The Canopus worked flawlessly with hunderds of scene transitions. I could not find one bad review on the Canopus product. It is plug and play. I have used Microsoft Movie Maker 2 and Pinnacle Studio 8 to capture the video. Hope this review was helpful.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars works great....sometimes...., August 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems 210100250 *studio Moviebox Dv (Personal Computers)

Initially I believed this worked reasonably well. That is if you put up with the capture freezing periodically. However, after owning it for two months (and therefore stuck with it), I find that it will capture off my DVD player perfectly, but it will not capture at all from my VCR. There simply is no video in the preview box and it does not capture. Pinnacle's "support" is poor. Forget speaking to a person. I am currently waiting to hear a response from email, however I suspect that it won't be helpful. If it was not for the expense I would simply throw it away. It is beginning to take up so much time. All for wanting to transfer tapes to DVD. I did end up buying a Panasonic DVD recorder with a hard drive for that purpose. It works well, the only draw back being the inability to edit beyond creating scences.( which is great to edit out commercials)

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars capture NIGHTMARE, July 26, 2003

By 

William T Watson (MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems 210100250 *studio Moviebox Dv (Personal Computers)

Everytime my source video has a scene change the capture hardware hangs, producing a stuttering image of the last frame sucessfully captured. The MovieBox manual says that during video "dropouts" the MovieBox "will wait for an interference free signal" and that this "can take a few momements" to acquire the new signal. It suggests that the unit be reset or power cycled if it does not properly reacquire the signal after it has stabilized. Since this issue occurs at every scene change you will need to babysit your capture so you can reset your hardware and restart the capture each time you turned off your camcorder during the original recording. The included software is good, but the hardware is fatally flawed - and the manufacturer is trying to sell it anyhow!