Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)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?
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Pinnacle Studio 9 - It's the easiest way to capture & edit your home movies, and turn them into an epic cinema experience! Simple drag-and-drop editing tools make it faster and easier than ever, to create perfect DVD movies at home.SmartMovie practically edits your movie for you -- automated editing lets you select an editing style, music and transitions with a mouse clickAuthor and burn DVD discs that will play in most set-top DVD playersAnalog cleaning tools restore old videotapes & reduce noise from old recordingsFull support for RTFx video plug-ins and VST audio plug-insComplete library of audio filters and image filters for fantastic audio/video effects
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