Pinnacle Systems Inc. Instant Copy 7

by Pinnacle Systems

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• ASIN: B00008LDHZ
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 29, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,228 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Pinnacle, best known for its video editing software, sets out to make DVD and CD copying a single-click process--and gets close with Instant Copy.

Instant Copy has one overriding task in life, to copy the contents of a DVD or CD onto another disc, and it aims to do it as painlessly as possible. At its simplest, you put a blank DVD-R or DVD+RW disk in your DVD writer, a source disk in your DVD player, run the program and click on Copy. For many tasks the default settings within the program won’t need changing.

The software goes away and copies up to 4.7 GB of data from your source DVD, saving it in an intermediate file on your hard drive before writing it out to the destination drive. This is the default copying method, but you can set up a suitably equipped computer to copy on-the-fly as well, where data is transferred directly from DVD drive to DVD drive, without being stored temporarily in between.

You don't have to transfer between two identical disc types. Instant Copy can move video files from DVD to Video CD and Super VCD and also handles CD copying. This means you can break down multi-file DVDs onto a number of CDs, which can be read on just about any computer with a CD drive.

And a final caveat. If you're looking at Instant Copy to copy commercial DVDs, such as those movies on rental or on sale at this very site, you can think again. The program specifically excludes any copy-protected DVDs, saying politely why it can't copy a disc which has protection on it. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Product Description

Featuring a user-friendly interface and unique compression technology, Pinnacle Systems InstantCopy software rapidly burns flawless copies of DVDs and CDs. It makes true 1:1 copies of DVDs that contain all the DVD content, including the main movie, menus, languages, subtitles and bonus material. It also transfers DVD movies to Video CDs and Super VCDs that can be played on nearly any PC or home DVD player. Finally, InstantCopy make perfect bit-for-bit copies of any CD media—including data, music, video and games--thanks to its support of all CD formats, all recordable CD formats and most CD drives.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best in its class!, March 17, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Instant Copy 7 (CD-ROM)

Those that have given Instant Copy poor reviews seem to have focused on the fact that if the DVD is "copyrighted", a third-party DVD decrypter must first be used to transfer the DVD to a hard-disk. It shouldn't stretch the imagination to assume that this is none for legal reasons. You do also need a DVD writer.

It is also true that there are (mostly freeware) software out there that can perform similar functions to Instant Copy. However, there is no "free" software as easy to use as I.C. and acts as a single, unified package.

One place where Instant Copy is in a class by itself is in the backup of compilation DVD's (e.g., The Sopranos Season X). Instant Copy leads the way in it's ability to 1) maintain the original menu systems and related extra content, and 2) compress this content onto one consumer-grade DVD.

Users should note that Instant Copy, like all similar products, offers no free lunch. Most commerical DVD's hold about twice the data that consumer-grade recordable DVD's hold. Compression is required to squeeze the original data down to fit -- the more you compress, the more data (i.e. picture quality) is lost.

Another nice feature of Instant Copy is that it does allow the user to specify the size of the final, compressed data. This is expecially useful if the DVD blanks you are recording on tend to have a problem writing data at the extreme outer edge of the DVD.

If the potential buyer is looking for an EXACT backup of their DVD, then a product like DVDXCOPY may be a better choice. However, you will then always be required to use two blank single-sided DVDs or one blank double-sided DVD to do a 1:1 copy of most commercial DVDs.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flawless DVDs are finally possible!, May 13, 2003

By 

Bubba (Phoenix) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Instant Copy 7 (CD-ROM)

How people think that copyrighted DVDs are going to be easily copied is beyond me. A program that would do that would be, by definition, illegal. Two different programs work, though. First, start of with SmartRipper, in the "backup" mode, then use Instant Copy. Viola!! Flawless BACKUP copies!!!

Once your movie is ripped, Pinnacle Instant Copy has the easiest to understand user interface, as well as making backups that look hard to distinguish from the original. I highly recommend this program as a complement with SmartRipper.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best and the Easiest!, March 25, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Instant Copy 7 (CD-ROM)

There are a few other software products that you could use that try to do the same thing as InstantCopy, but none do it better or as easily:

DVD95Copy: Still had a few bugs with the audio stream processing when I tried it, and it will not burn directly to discs.

DVD2One: Does not currently do DVD9->DVD5 copies (although they are working on this for the next version) and does not burn to discs.

DVDXCopy: Does not currently do DVD9->DVD5 copies, but will make an exact copy of your source DVD by spanning two discs (this requires you to swap discs during playback.)

Cool features of InstantCopy:

- Lets you keep all content and menus if you wish.
- Offers one-click automatic processing if you are a novice.
- Allows you to choose video tracks, subtitling tracks, and audio streams to include in the copy.
- Allows you to individually tweak the compression used on the various video tracks if you want to. (This is useful in boosting the quality of the main feature, while turning down, or eliminating the disc extras that you might be less interested in.)
- Burns directly to your media (DVDR or CDR).