Video-Editing Reviews

This Sony software is actually made by Pinnacle Systems, and thus Sony's helpdesk will refer you to Pinnacle. Boy did I need help! The software came without a serial # required to install it, and it took me almost 8 hours with email, fax and phone with Pinnacle to get a serial #. The FireWire card supplied did not include the promised installation instructions, so I had ...[to] guess. Once I got the serial #, the installation went well, but Pinnacle's help desk is not an impressive outfit. Once installed, my Win XP PC instantly recognized my Sony Mini DV camcorder, and I downloaded my tape onto my hard drive with good intuitive controls.

First off... I have not tried this!!!!

BUT! When I got here, my first thought was.... OK... what is this, since amazon does not seem to supply ANY information about it at all. So I went hunting, and I figure I'd share my finds with you.

Key Features:

- Add titles, narration, special effects and more
- Capture one hour of DV tape in 150 MB of disk space with SmartCapture feature
- Create DV tapes, MPEG files, AVI clips, or RealVideo files for web-streaming
- The perfect companion to your DV or Digital8 camcorder

Package includes

2-Sony DVM60PR MiniDV Tapes
1-IEEE 1394 PCI Board
Pinnacle Systems Studio DV Editing Software
Instruction Guide to Movie Making
1-IEEE 1394 (Firewire/i.link) 6-Pin x 4-Pin cable

There was a note on the same page that I found all this saying that this only supports NTSC, NOT PAL version...

overall, this looks like a pretty good deal for those who want to transfer their MiniDV's to their computers, only gave it 4 stars since A) I personally haven't used it, and B) When it comes to video editing, I'm more a type A personality, and I think I'd like more control than this product would give me. but thats just me :)

hope this helps

I have just bought this "audio editing package" as a part of my first video camera kit. I found it great because it contains all do you need to begin working on your digital videos, the software interface its very intuitive and very easy to use and you can be making things on broadcast quality very soon.

The only complaint that I have, and the reason why I only assign 4 stars to this product, it's that the documentation is very poor (actually doesn't mention anything about the PCI card setup) and also I didn't find any help on-line to accomplish this task (neither in the websites of Sony and Pinnacle) .

If you have a medium knowledge on setting up a PCI device within your PC and you are interested in begin video edition this product is for you. (By the way the only difference between this package and the D8 labeled it's the media tapes they have inside).

As I write this review, I've spent about 10 hours total fiddling with my computer (which is an HP AMD XP 1800+ based system with an NVidia GeForce 2 grahpics card) trying to install this product. I spent about 2 hours installing and re-installing the product. The software would not start up and would throw an Windows XP exception error.

Upon reading the support forums on the Pinnacle website, I came upon several users with the exact same problem. I tried solutions suggested such as cleaning the registry, defragmenting the hard drive, installing patches, several re-boots, switching the PCI card, IRQ settings, upgrading drivers etc. None of this will work, this software is plain poorly designed. Don't waste your time on this product since I am a programmer by trade and know exactly what I am doing with my computer.

Avoid this product at all cost. One example of poor product design is that the Studio 9 software does not come with an Uninstaller - so you cannot do a clean uninstall. The patches you download from the Pinnacle site will install but do nothing to improve the situation. And guess what? No uninstall facility for them too.

I think this product could use a 'Zero' star rating if there was one.

I'm very stingy with 5 star ratings, but this product deserves it. First the hardware: the board and its driver were a snap to install. You'll only have a problem if you're uncomfortable opening up the computer to put the card in a PCI slot. Otherwise, you're home free. The board itself has digital and analog (both RCA and S-VHS) inputs. As for the Studio 9 software, it is very easy to use; I was able to able to start doing basic stuff within 15 minutes of finishing the install, and have been able to easily pick up more advanced techniques as I've gone along. The finished DVDs look pretty sharp, with menus and various types of transitions. As a result, I've been able to combine my pile of VHS-C tapes into edited DVDs. The program doesn't have the power and controls of Adobe Premiere, but Premiere is aimed at professional videographers and lists at $699. Studio 9 is for non-professionals. The closest thing I can compare it to for ease of use is Easy CD Creator 5, before Roxio tried to make it a media swiss army knife. Creator 5 was brilliantly designed for ease of use, but Media Creator 7 tries to do too many things and ends up a mess (I've uninstalled it and gone back to 5). Like Creator 5, Studio 9 has a good, clear manual included if you have any questions (and you won't have many). As a book of tips for advanced uses of the program and shooting video, Visual Quickstart Guide to Studi 9 by Jan Ozer is pretty good, but for the basics, the manual included with this product does the trick. Here's the proof: I bought this three months ago, and I have yet to call tech support.

Been using the product since almost first inception. This version installed much more easily. Best advice: Find other users in your neighborhood/church/workplace. ASK! There are many of us around! Having a mini-forum locally is dynamite for solving those little buggers of problems that crop up.
I videotape and burn onto 2-6 DVDs a week and love to do WMVs with it!

Pluses:
(1) Very easy to learn and use, attractive interface, like the slider for thumbnail size
(2) Loved the red-eye correction tool
(3) Great price
(4) Liked the fact that I got to try it for free, which is something Adobe does not offer for its Photoshop Album

Minuses:
(1) I think the web album feature is weak. Picasa does not do a good job of optimizing pictures for the web. I ended up batch re-sizing and optimizing my photos in Photoshop before creating the album. The file size from Picasa's re-sizing algorithm was often as much as double of what I got from the Photoshop optimization, with no visible gain in quality.
(2) Really did not like the fact that I couldn't add captions for my pictures while making a web album.
(3) I did not care for the options available in web album formats.
(4) Picasa also crashed several times when I was trying to move pictures to a new blank album. When I restarted, my picture tray was empty even though I had "held" the pictures, so I had to start over.
(5) Not sufficient power to make corrections. The enhance feature worked really well at times and at others it seemed to do nothing. I would prefer more control for exposure and color correction.

In conclusion, I think Picasa's OK for people who just want a way to organize and keep track of the pictures on their computer and occasionally email some to their friends and family. But for more sophisticated user who wants more control in correcting their pictures and wants to create web albums, it does not make the cut.

This is one of the best digital photo archival programs around. One of the nice features is the ability to take a stored photo and print it or e-mail it easily. It's only fault is slight (very slight) difficulty in using the stored image and transferring it to any digital photo editing software. The editing software with Picasa is sufficient but not sophisticated. Overall this is an excellent product.

This item will work with Win 2000, but you need to download the Win 2K driver from Hawking or the Internet before installation. I haven't figured out the MGI software that it came with, and am still having problems with their serial numbers included to install. The actual Hawking unit is simply a device that plugs into your USB on one end, and a single RCA video jack, OR (and this is important) an S-video jack. My older analog camcorder doesn't have S-video jack so I could have bought a cheaper, "RCA jack" only, unit. Overall the resolution through my camcorder is great; much better than just a WebCam.

So far this product has worked out very well for me on my laptop computer. Movie capture for DVD has been fast with no problems in audio going out of sync with Video as was common in Studio 8. Capturing direct to MPEG format for DVD has been a dream and allows me to have HOURS of video captures prior to making a movie.

Pinnacle Studio 9 and the Hollywood F/X programs come with the package. Studio 9 has no real new suprises in it (other than the direct MPEG capture). I've run into a couple of UI-related bugs, that are fairly easy to work around.

One thing to note is how incredibly TOUGH the Moviebox is. Made in Germany out of a cast aluminum shell and VERY high impact plastic, I'm pretty sure even the "pro-sumer" types would be impressed.

Pinnacle's support, however, is terrible. Hopefully you won't have too many questions about the product - if you do, don't expect answers from Pinnacle support - you won't get them. That's part of the reason for the 3-star rating.

If you're looking at the low-end Dazzle products from Pinnacle - don't bother - they're garbage. The Studio products are really the only ones to bother with. And if you have a notebook PC then *this* product really shines.

Lousy camera, period. It installed okay on a Win2000 and
a WinXP machine, but unless you have very bright light on the camera, the image is way too dark. If you enable the "low light" feature, or turn up the brightness control, the image brightens up, but the framerate drops to about 10-12 frames per second. If you want decent live-capture video at 30 fps, forget it.

Once in a while, it mysteriously "disappears" as an available video capture device on a WinXP machine, and I have to reboot to get it back.

Can only capture 160x120, 320x240, or 640x480 sizes. You really need 352x288 for videoconferencing.

Compare this to a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 and you'll see there is no comparison. The Logitech is better in every conceivable way.

I bought this as a replacement for a Logitech WebCam that is definitely long in the tooth ... no comparison. Much crisper images, higher resolution, faster frame rate thanks to USB2 (there's also a firewire version); better in every respect. Install under XP was quite easy, but I did have to reinstall the drivers (as flagged by XP's device manager). Incidentally, the manual supplied on CD is the same as the paper one that comes in the box. View software is a tad flaky (pop-ups blank out parts of preview - preview doesn't refresh; capture blanks out preview entirely). I checked out the ADS web-site to see if there was a more recent version of the supplied software and found on-line support for the WebCam to be either well-hidden or non-existent. As a WebCam, this one is probably worth 5 stars, but I dropped the rating to 4 because of the evident support shortcomings on the part of the manufacturer. On the plus side, the button on the camera neatly triggers a capture routine that pops-up a window with a still ready to be saved to file ... very cool (maybe that raises the rating to 4.5). I also captured a sample (.avi) movie and played it back under Media Player at full screen - the result was impressive, almost astounding given the typical limitations of a WebCam. I think this is an excellent buy for the money ... it's a keeper for me.

Most tech products now don't include a large well-written manual. Its a waste of ink and shipping weight. For the other reviewers - did you look on the CD? Theres a full manual on there! And the quick-install guide says to stick it in before installing the camera so you should have seen it!

Anyway, this is my 5th webcam and its the best so far. 99% of webcams for sale are not good. "Up to 30 frames/second" typically means you will get about "1 frame/second". Seriously. They are all bad (with the exception of a few end-of-life products namely such as IBM Webcam pro and 3com Homeconnect). This webcam provides 15 frames/second at 640x480 and I've tested that. Most webcams wont even do 640x480 and even fewer will ever hit 15 frames/second on any resolution!

As far as brightness goes, the video off this webcam is not very bright. But this sacrifice is acceptable since gamma correction usually reduces image quality so just turn on the lights when you use it. Its that simple.

It has a neat tripod that is very configurable and the webcam itself is pretty attractive. If you don't mind having a webcam which is not much better than emailing a blurry picture of yourself then this webcam is not for you. But if you like VIDEO and don't want to buy a professional $300 system, then this webcam beats the competition by a landslide. (and theres not much competition in the arena of good webcams - I've tried and read enough reviews to know!).

I tried to pair the card in this package with the new Maxtor 5000DV. The Pinnacle card toasts the Maxtor drive every time. Maxtor customer service can replicate my error and has been very helpful. Pinnacle customer service has been sarcastic, irresponsible, and completely unhelpful.

The Pinnacle software only offers minor improvements over my existing software, so I'm out [$$$] and have a worthless Pinnacle package sitting in the closet.

Don't buy from Pinnacle until they get their customer service reps up to snuff!

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 had already ordered Pinnacle Studio DV from Dell when I started reading all of the horrible reviews. I bought the program after seeing some DVDs that my boss made of his son's football games & he said he had no problems. When it arrived I decided to try it and hope for the best & I'm glad I did. I captured about 90 minutes of video that I had shot using a Sony TRV-350. The capture process when very smoothly. Editing confused me at first (I didn't want to read the manual) but I caught on quickly and edited the video down to about 30 minutes of scenes that I wanted to burn to DVD. The rendering process did take a while: 30 to 45 minutes but when it was done my dvd drive spit out a completed dvd with the titles and transitions that I added and it looked great when I played it in by DVD player. I had no problems at all during the entire process including installation. I did follow Pinnacle's recommendations and bought a separate hard drive for capturing and I made sure no other applications were running in XP. I am very pleased with the product. I do have a new system: Dell 4600, 2.6ghz P4, 512 RAM, 40 GB internal, 80GB Western Digital firewire external hardrive (I used the card that came with Pinnacle for the firewire connection as the Dell 4600 didn' have one - the Pinnacle card comes with two connections one of which you must use for your digital camcorder). I am very pleased with this product.

This product and the bundled Pinnacle 8 Studio software delivered spotty performance. It generally ptured the video from tape OK, but the interface (and especially the capture format options) was very non-intuitive. The DVD renedering 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.

I was OK with Studio 8 for the first few months I had it, I made simple VCDs and DVDs of my friends, it was amusing.

Then I tried to make some more complicated things, with multi-level menus, and a number of different file types, and fill up the whole DVD. I ended up with about 5 coasters. The pinnacle tech support was no help at all.

Then I found TMPG DVD Author, used to make DVD files which are then burned from within the program or burned with Nero. TMPG has not produced any coasters yet. Now I do all my editing/transitions with Studio 8, render it, and use TMPG to actually make the DVD.

So all in all, I had to spend an extra $90 for a REAL dvd authoring progam to go along with Studio 8.

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 have used Pinnacle Studio 7 and 8 on two different custom built computers and I am very pleased with both versions. I have read many reviews from other users that state that their audio and video are out of sync. I have edited several home movies and have compressed to both MPEG 1 (VCD) and MPEG 2 (SVCD) and (DVD). With all three formats, I have had perfect audio/video syncronization. I do not know what combination of factors would lead to these syncronization problems, but from my experience, assuming the uniformity of the Pinnacle Studio software from user to user, the problem is not inherently with this product.

In addition, I have not made any particular note that this software contributes to the crashing of my computer any more than any other program or operation.

The only reason I did not give this product a 5 star review is because of its transitions. The majority of its transitions display the Pinnacle icon, which I find to be a shameless plug, and I refuse to juxtapose it with images of my family for all posterity to see. I would also like to be able to superimpose images.

Pinnacle has a winner here!!!!!! A full feature set of tools for the novice to the pro at your disposal. Starting with SMARTMOVIE: 3 step movie making, to the ability to color correct old distorted footage. This is a must have for anyone who is thinking about turning their Home Video's into memories they can cherish forever. Thanks Pinnacle!!!!

I have used 4 different brands of video editing software around this price point. Pinnacle Studio 9 is the winner in most regards. I'd give Microsoft's movie maker a highly defeatured second place for being very easy to use but far less functional.

Pros of Studio:
- Very flexible
- High quality output
- Version 9 has been completely stable (hardware incompatibilities can cause problems though, as other reviews show, so check if you're compatible -- if you're not, the crashes are a royal pain as I've seen with other video software)
- Burn straight to DVD
- Create DVD scenes in your movie very easily
- Merges in photos effectively
- fades, wipes, effects are outstanding

Cons
- Limited number of tracks for audio/video -- (as with all sw at this pricepoint)
- No pans and fades for photos, only transitions
- No support for WMV format, which is much more compressed but lower quality

Overall, you can VERY easily go from your DV tape into Pinnacle, and then edit/cut/fade add music, etc, then burn to DVD with very professional results. The UI is intuitive and the results are great.

If you're interested in slightly simpler work and don't need great flexibility, the Microsoft movie maker (free with XP) is actually quite good too. As of my last use you can't burn to DVD though so need added software for that.

My review is for the full version 9, not the upgrade, but they should be the same. I had so many problems with version 8, but I made the mistake of hoping version 9 would be better. WRONG.
The good: Pinnacle Studio is packed with features and is quite easy to use.
The bad: It's JUNK. Full of bugs even with the latest updates. It's slow too. STAY AWAY from this product!

I had Studio 8 and enjoyed it. I moved to studio 9 and hate it. There are lots of bugs too many to mentions. There Quality Assurance and marketing department has done a horrible product release that is full of bugs!!!!

My suggestion is stick with studio 8 if you have it. Otherwise go buy another competitor product.

Good Luck

I've recently upgraded from Studio 8 to version 9 and have been pretty pleased. As yet, I've only had one lockup. (while searching the help.) My projects have been a mix of analog capture in AVI and MPEG2 files, as well as DV. These have had a number of effects in some cases, some clips were shortened, and I've played with the DVD menu structure. (basic stuff) The output from a burned DVD appears pretty good for the price. However, I haven't tackled any large projects yet. With Studio 8 I've captured 2 hour movies from TiVo, created menus/chapters, then burned them to DVD. I mention this because there would ocassionally be a A/V sync problem after some scene transistions. The 16:9 support is nice, but frame conversions are weak. Conversion of 4:3 to widescreen simply squashes the frame - distorting everything. Some other options like screen cropping would be nice, or allowing mixed formats in the same project. If you only use one format, then it's not an issue.

Other than those points, my complaint would be the inclusion of locked-out features. I'd rather not install something I can't/won't use. Like SPAM on my PC I cannot control. Oh, and the S/N included wasn't valid - oops! Service emailed me another in about 12 hours.

In general, check that your PC can handle the software, and is stable - it appears to demand more than Studio 8. I'd suggest browsing the manufacture discussion forums (Pinnacle) to see what the common issues are, and how to resolve them. Finally, all software has bugs - so if you grab the first copy - expect many patches (or simply wait a few months.) ps. the latest patch was ~50Mb