Customer Reviews

Pinnacle Systems Studio Deluxe Version 8 Video Editing

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I saw over 100 consumer reviews ... praising this product and an equal number saying that it is hopelessly buggy or simply does not work.

I am a moderately experienced PC user who bought and installed Studio Deluxe version 8.25.21 in June, 2003. This product is beautifully designed and rich in features, for a consumer video product. I found a number of blatant and frustrating bugs, but in the end was able to create a beautiful 30 minute video.

Here is what I recommend:

1. Go to the Pinnaclesys.com site and spend at least 20 minutes going through their forum postings. Notice that the forum is nicely designed and very active. Notice that there are hundreds of very frustrated users who have spent weeks or even months getting Pinnacle to work the way it's supposed to. Notice that many of the threads have almost no helpful info from Pinnacle staff and are sprinkled with comments like "Hello, Pinnacle... anybody home?" or sad accounts of trying to get phone support. Users list the things they've tried, and eventually somebody comes up with a solution or work-around. Do not buy this product unless you are willing to troubleshoot your problems with other users on the Pinnacle forum and try 7 things before finding the thing that solves your problem.

2. If you make the plunge, buy it from a local retailer with a 14 day return policy (or better) and get right to work.

3. Install this on a late model computer running XP. Follow all their install recommendations (and those on the forum) to the letter, including adding a 2nd hard drive. My PC was a ... Dell 2350, but it was very up-to-date, and it was adequate.

4. If you are working to a deadline, leave lots of time for problem solving and refining your work. No matter what software you use, you will spend a crazy amount of time polishing your video.

5. Complete a small project before starting a large project. You may lose your work and have to start over, or find that you are unable to output your work to DVD.

6. There are bugs in this software, but keep your cool, and don't blame everything on Pinnacle. In my case, 1/3 of the problems were operator error, and 1/3 of the problems were due to a bad DVD burner.

7. If you can, wait 6-18 months. The whole video editing/ DVD burner situation may be ready for prime time by then.

I purchased this package to enable me to make copies of some older 8mm tapes. From looking at the product tour on the company's web site, it looked like just what I was looking for.

I got it home and installed easily. The software was easy to use and seemed pretty powerful for this price range. I was thrilled.

I got my camera hooked up and was ready to start the transfer. Everything looked good and I was ready to go. The capture process looked great. However, when I started to play back the captured segments, the video was very choppy and jerked around. I also noticed that the sound was not in sync with the video. On a 20 minute segment, the sound was about 2 second off. This is really bad considering that both the sound and the video were going into the same Pinnacle card. I have now spent the better part of four days trying all kinds of things to get this to work and nothing has helped.

The tech support is awful. You basically get to look through a set of questions and answers. Most of the answers seem to be "make sure you have the latest version of the software and drivers". The only way to ask for support is to post a question to their support forum and hope some answers. After waiting three days, I haven't heard anything.

I wish there was a simple easy to use product that would allow me to do a quality job of transferring my 8mm tape to DVD. I guess I'll try one of the tape-to-DVD places that will do this for $20/tape. I won't get to put all the cool menus and transitions and titles on for this price, but at least my tapes will be backed up and I won't have to worry about further degradation of the quality.

Direct and to the point. You MUST significantly have more horsepower than the product specifications state. I have attempted this product on a 2.6 GHZ, 1024 MB RAM, Pentium 4 processor, with over 120 GB of free disk space. These specifications vastly exceed Pinnacle's stated requirements.

My findings:
Expect to spend 6 hours for every 1 hour of DVD generated.
Expect to only be successful writing to DVD about 10% of the time.
Expect to lose your captured data, or for your data to become corrupt on a regular basis.
Expect to wait 30-60 minutes on hold for technical support.
Expect technical support (once you get someone) to be of very litte help.
Expect your frustration level to significantly increase.

I have thus far spent over 70 hours attempting to convert my home VHS tapes to DVD. Thus far I have been successful on one 24 minute DVD (even that one is inferior in appearance than the original VHS tape). I have researched over 1000 of the postings on the Pinnacle user forum web site to find any information that would assist me in my endeavor. While I have found a lot of useful information I have also found that that essentially the product is unreliable and should have never been released to the public (even if it were free).

I am technically qualified (on the PC/software level). This product has great promise but simply cannot deliver. Check out the user forums on the www.pinnaclesys.com site BEFORE you buy this product. Granted, someone will always complain about the best of products; however, in this case the sheer volume of complaints should tell you something.

Finally, DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. I cannot offer any other suggestions for alternative products as I am still searching for one which will professionally and reliably perform as advertised.

With high hopes and lots of enthusiasm, I made the decision to buy Pinnacle Studio Deluxe 8. Many user reviews around the web complain about how bad the installation process was. I decided to roll the dice and hope for the best (after all, I used to write Windows device drivers and some installation products for a living).

Boy did I get hosed. It's never a good sign when the standard installation tells you to repeatedly ignore the New Hardware Wizard dialog while the installer tries to automagically install driver software. It's also not good when the software on the CD's is known buggy but there's no installation instruction saying "check our website first for necessary updates, lest you get hosed by our updates not fully being able to uninstall earlier installations".

I wish I could say it's a short story, but a total of 18 hours worth of failed installations over 2 weeks (working with Pinnacle's tech support) still yields the unrecognized card and hodge-podge installed Pinnacle drivers that can't see the driver. Of course, their uninstaller software doesn't properly uninstall, so repeated installations mean having to manually delete files off disk, run registry cleaning utilities, multiple reboots, etc all under Pinnacle's tech support instruction.

Save yourself the time, hassle, money, and just buy the Canopus ADVC-1394 instead of this not-ready-for-primetime product; the Canopus card literally just plugs in and WORKS right out of the box. No funky driver installations, no repeated multiple uninstall/re-installs, no swapping multiple CD's and software update patches, etc.

I bought this software over a year ago to edit video from my Sony Digital 8 camera.

Installation:
It took me close to 3 months to setup because of issues between Windows ME and the included FireWire card. I actually had to hack the Microsoft drivers .INF file to get the card to work properly on my system.

User Interface
The software is amazing easy to use. The user interface is very intuitive.

To capture, hookup your Digital camcorder to the Firewire card with the included cable. You just say you want to record and up to 15 minutes of video is transfered at a time. This is due to a limit in the size of AVI files.

The system is capable of automatically sensing scene breaks, so when it captures, it automatically organizes scenes.

For editing, it just have to arrange the scenes. You can also shorten the scenes through again a very good UI.

The software has 3 voice tracks. You can easily add music from MP3s or CDs to your video. You can also do voiceovers ( I haven't tried this yet ).

If you are making DVDs, you can add chapters and menus. The UI for doing this is pretty good as well.

You can also add stills. I've made many videos which are combination of video and stills pictues from a digital camera

The software comes with many transitions. You can do fads and other cool effects.

You can output your movie to DVD, S-VCD, VCD, RealNetworks, Microsoft Media Player Format, or MPEG ( No Quicktime support ).

Now the bad: The software has been very unreliable, at times, I lost hours of work. Anyone who looks at the message boards will see that the user base of this software is generally unhappy. I seem to finally have a patch that has made the software reasonable reliable. I can honestly say that I love the software but have never been so frustrated with the qauality of a piece of software before. When it works its really good, but it doesn't always work.

Because of the unreliability of the software, I would not recommend it to a computer novice.

I am not pleased with the product at all. It worked like advertised twice, The third time I could not change/update titles nor could I add their supplied sound. Attempting to add sound would create a major problem and athe status would flicker and quit responding. After a number of uninstalls and reinstalls I avoided the above problems and it would not render at all, just sit there. I have checked the Q&A sections without fnding any resolution. I have e-mailed and have not received even a hello. I do not believe thay are customer orientated AT ALL. I would not recommed this product unless you are very good at debugging commerical software.

My wife received this as a gift. Not being particularly technical I installed the software (I'm a software engineer). The product generated an error that was not documented anywhere (online or within the guide) and technical help was as bad as it possibly could be. Pinnacle Systems responded to my emails with answers to their most common problems, none of which related to our problem. They had obviously never even read the email. Phone support is non existent (I'm currently on hold and have been for over 30 minutes). I would strongly recommend not buying this product unless you are very technical AND very patient.

I wish I had read some of the reviews here before buying this program. It looked great, very nice design, lots of options. A few crashes here and there, but I've learned to save often. The real problems come in when you try and burn a DVD. Its really bad at only burning part of your DVD, which causes your movie to stop in the middle. Adjusting brightness can lead to an black screen on final DVD burn. Still images, which you lay titles over etc, all get lost when you save your project and reopen it.

Its too bad, the layout and design is just awesome. I had such high hopes when I read through it. I hope they can fix some of this for the next release, since this version is nearly useless.

First off, I have to say that this product works very well but only if your computer is very good. It's better if your computer is a newer model so that it can handle the memory hogging of the software. Also, make sure that you have a second hard drive to store all your video files. I didn't have a second hard drive and thought it would be no problem. I was wrong. I couldn't upload anything until my second hard drive was put in. Now I have a 120 GB harddrive and my problems are over. The unit works really well and my friends and family have been amazed at the results this system can do. I can spend hours on it because it is so much fun. So in all, I would say this is awesome product that works really well if the computer it's put on can handle it.

This product and the bundled Pinnacle 8 Studio software delivered spotty performance. It generally capptured the video from tape OK, but the interface (and especially the capture format options) was very non-intuitive. The DVD rendering was slow, and results were hit and miss: some were OK, some failed outright and some were rendered with annoying frequent color shifts (about every 3 seconds throughout the entire DVD). This all took place on a new, fast machine with plenty of RAM and disk space. I'm pretty comfortable with new apps, but the Studio 8 is very hard to figure out. Consider the PYRO A/V link from ADS instead.