Amazon.com: Pinnacle Studio 9 [OLD VERSION]: Software

94 Reviews

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(51)

Average Customer Review

2.1 out of 5 stars (94 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

194 of 202 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pinnacle 9...possibly the most frustrating program EVER, February 28, 2004

By A Customer

Pinnacle's line of Studio products are like a youthful blushing bride...full of sweet promises, amazing beauty, and hopeful thoughts of a wonderful future together. Until you marry her. Then your days turn to nightmares and and you find yourself pounding your head against a wall, wondering how something that looked so great could be so incredibly bad.

Folks...RUN, do not walk, away from this product. DO NOT be fooled by the great interface, the intuitive workflow, the incredible ease of editing, the hundreds of features that could make creating and editing DVD's the easiest thing you've ever done. Here's the gospel, folks...THE DAMN THING SIMPLY DOESN'T WORK. If you don't believe me, check out the user forums on Pinnacle's own website. It will take you 99% of the way (including 6 hours of rendering for a 1 hour DVD) and then REFUSE TO CREATE YOUR DVD. You just want to throw the freaking thing against a wall. Then you try to look at the user forums to see what the answer to your problem is and THERE ISN'T ONE. The program is just buggy and doesn't work most of the time.

And before you cast aspersions on my system, I have an Intel P4 processor running on an Intel mobo with half a gig of RAM and a brand new ATI All in Wonder video card. The hard drive I use for video is a new 250 GB Western Digital. This computer runs everything...it ought to run this.

This has the potential to be one of the greatest products ever made, and exactly in the right place at the right time. Sonic MyDVD is too simplistic and hard to edit with (even though I created about 10 DVD's in three days before falling in love/hate with Studio). Movie Maker 2 won't author DVD's. Adobe Premier is too expensive, and you have to add Encore to author DVD's. Nero and Roxio are not full featured enough. Nope...Pinnacle 9 is the perfect program in the perfect place at the perfect time. It has everything you could want...except the ability to make a DVD without driving you freakin' bonkers.

The interface is divided into 3 parts, Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. Capture allows you to capture in DV, MPEG 2 (DON'T!!!. Just don't. NEVER use the MPEG 2 feature. It doesn't work) You can have it chop your video up into scenes based on a set time duration, the time of the scene in the camera (digital) or the video content itself. This feature works.

Once captured, you go to the Edit tab, where it is stupid easy to drag the video clips onto a timeline or storyboard...your choice. You can then apply fades, dissolves, or dozens of cool transitions between the scenes. You can easily chop parts out, split scenes, and rearrange things. The timeline view, especially, is amazingly easy and fun to use. You can add voiceovers or background music from CD, mp3, or .wav files on your computer. You can make the image brighter or increase the contrast or change the color saturation. You can speed it up or slow it down. You can add titles from dozens of cool looking presets or make your own. You can apply effects, fades, disolves, etc to the titles. You can add still pictures. You can add effects, you can do damn near anything.

Now we get to part 3...Make Movie. Here is where this product falls from 5 to 1 stars. Take your hours of work, your edits and fades and transitions and try to burn them onto a DVD. I dare you...just try. I will say that you do have other choices...you can turn your creation into an MPEG that you can play on your computer, or a DV that you can feed back into your camcorder via Firewire, or stream, or "share", whatever that is. But what you want to do is to create a DVD and use that cool new burner your got, right?

So you tell it "best video quality" and hit the "Make DVD" button. And now we stop. And we go and do something else for FIVE OR SIX HOURS while we "render"...a phrase you will soon learn to hate.

I will say at this point that Sonic MyDVD does this part in about 30 minutes...this "rendering" and the output looks great and the menu works and all is well. So remember...30 minutes versus 5 hours.

And after rendering for five or six hours, odds are that your big badass machine will simply...stop. It will crash and will not even have the decency to give you an error message to tell you why. You will just come back the next morning expecting a DVD and it won't be there. Why? BECAUSE THE PROGRAM DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't take my word....go to http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docsupport1.asp?division_id=1&langue_id=2&product_id=1501&product_name=Studio%20version%209%20&page_id=86

and look at what the users have to say. One guy was even talking about a class action lawsuit somewhere in there.

There are people in there professing years of experience designing and building software who can't understand how Pinnacle could release this and put their name on it. Trust me...its ugly. Problems do NOT get solved. And if you want a full history, check out the forums for Pinnacle 8, where the screaming is at full volume. And there sits the wise Pinnacle staff saying, in effect, Pinnacle 9 is not a miracle fix, and probably won't be any better. Damn skippy.

And these are user forums where Pinnacle employees routinely log on to answer questions. And while you are there, have a quick look at some of the arrogant, condescending replies that the techs give to the user's questions. Also, note the tone of the users...they are just really really frustrated because the program doesn't work.

Some of the workarounds are comical. "Rearrange some of the scenes....a scene might be corrupt"..."cut the movie up into smaller parts, render them, and then combine them back together into the movie you want"..."defrag your hard drive". And the sad thing is that sometimes they work.

I have used Studio 8 and Studio 9, and all I have done is edit my home movies (captured through a DV camcorder straight into Studio), chopped out the boring parts, added a few transitions and titles and a menu. I HAVE NEVER ONCE GOTTEN PINNACLE TO TAKE THIS INFO AND BURN IT ONTO A DVD without several coasters, and doing some goofy workaround that adds ANOTHER five hours to the process.

I use this product because I am a junkie...a willing participant in an abusive relationship, and here I sit with my bruised bicep, torn tank top, and black eye telling the cops "I'm okay...I just know he'll change someday and stop kicking my ASS." Yes, I am hooked like Marion Barry. But please heed my pathetic example, and RUN, DO NOT WALK away from this frustrating, maddening, buggy, half baked, kludge piece of garbage.

Until the next upgrade, man...I just KNOW the next upgrade is gonna fix the problems, man...I just know it. I just know it...I just...hey man...spare change?

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Just when you think you've created a masterpiece... , August 17, 2004

By	Karl Morkunas (Naples, FL) - See all my reviews

Pinnacle holds a prestigious name as a major video editing software developer, but their innovative Studio 9 contains some bugs that put one through pure HELL! I have produced over 7 successful DVDs without many problems, except a few occasional crashes here and there. However the tides can turn dramatically after just one restart, I was just working on my most prized piece of edited video (footage from Hurricane Charley) near 16 hrs of time invested into making it all perfect when disaster struck. What happened after I saved the project and restarted my PC? The .stu the studio file extension corrupts itself and causes the timeline to NOT OPEN. Although I could start fresh again from the beginning (suggested by Pinnacle tech support) and piece together the entire puzzle again, how would I know which problem caused this fatal corruption. According to pinnacle tech support "The problem could have been caused by thousand different things" (i.e. anti-spyware software, anti-virus software, a corrupted file extension, or most likely a bug in the software). Now of course Pinnacle would never take the blame or admit this program is "buggy" (as one can see from the majority of the other reviews). If you do wish to purchase this program, I HIGHLY recommend backing up large/important projects onto a DVD or additional hard drive just in case you run into a the catastrophe I did. In conclusion, as a safe consumer you should look to purchase a different video editing software program altogether that does not run as strangely as Studio operates (creating a gateway extension file [.stu] that acts as the timeline that accesses separate files spread throughout your hard drive that you designate). Although the innovative idea of ease, style, and intuitive editing options may immediately captivate it's user... be weary of its evil bugs that could put you in a situation where you will regret even wasting your time with such a infernal of piece of poorly programmed software.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A lot of features and a lot of bugs, May 7, 2004

By A Customer

Studio 9 has a lot of nice features, but it's loaded with strange bugs. This is particularly disappointing because I upgraded from Studio 8 to get away from a lot of bugs.

Pinnacle Systems needs to focus their efforts on improving product quality and stop worrying about matching features from Roxio and Ulead.

So far, I've dealt with mismatched audio, failures to load existing AVI files, crashes during menu editing and crashes during rendering. Error messages are terrible -- no information on what happened.

Support has been OK. Submitted a question and received and answer in about 12 hours. Not sure they really read my submission though. They suggested several fixes that didn't apply to my situation.

Don't know if I could recommend this product yet. I'm trying to create a project for a team I mentor and I'm about to hit the deadline. I'm hoping they'll come out with a patch soon.

Unfortunately, it looks like the products from Roxio and Ulead have just as many problems.

=== UPDATE: OK. Finally completed a 110 minute production. A few things I've learned while using this software:

1. Reboot your computer when you are ready to start rendering. Studio 9 seems to lose memory as you do various edits.
2. Do NOT try to mix different video clips (MPEG, AVI, etc.) in the same project. Studio will get confused and scramble your audio. Instead, render each into the same DV-quality AVI or MPEG format and combine the rendered clips.
3. Break your project into a series of smaller subprojects and render each of these into the above format. Then combine them in a master project. This will save you a LOT of headaches.
4. Don't try multi-level menu systems (menus that invoke other menus). I've spend hours and hours on this and still haven't been successful. Limit yourself to single-level menus.
5. Pinnacle's plan is to sell you a variety of add-on packages for transitions, enhanced audio, etc. Unfortunately, all of those enhancements show up in the menu system. Make sure you have a license for a given transition before using it.
6. Be very patient when making edits. Studio will queue up several commands and after a long delay, start executing them. This often leads to things landing somewhere else than where you originally thought. Move slowly and cautiously and you'll be OK.
7. I wouldn't attempt a project without at least 512M of RAM, 60G of free disk space and a P4 2GHz processor. Forget what the specs say. It needs serious resources.
8. MOST IMPORTANT: Do a Save-As and increment the file name EVERY time you do something significant. Studio project files will get corrupted and not warn you. You'll be banging your head against the wall trying to understand WHY a render crashes or audio scrambles only to find the file became corrupted hours ago.