Video-Editing Reviews

I own an HP Desktop Pavilion that I bought a year ago. I installed this product with no problems by opening up my PC, inserting the PCI card, connecting the power to the PCI card, booting up my PC, and then installing the appropriate driver. I have the Windows 98 Second Edition operating system on my PC.

Then I hooked up my Sony DCR TRV 33 mini DV camcorder, of course using the firewire interface. The ActionTec PCI card failed to recognize the camera. ... the cable provided with the product was bad. ... I will never purchase another product from ActionTec again.

I bought this product and tried it in a number of different machines--all Win 98 or Win2k. Windows recognized it after some coaxing. But the performance was dreadful in each case--I either got a choppy data stream or none at all. I checked out their website... all in all pretty useless. So I wrote to Actiontec customer service about it and never got a reply. Avoid this company and it's products.

I had no problem installing the card (I guess I'm one of the lucky ones). It works, but the video editing software that comes with it is useless. I'm not a pro, but it took me forever to figure out how to input the video, and now I can't figure out how to edit it (it did not come with instructions). I'm going to buy some other software. There were no bad reviews before I bought this product, but after reading the others, I'm glad it worked for me. However, I would be cautious about buying this product due to other's experiences. Good luck.

I haven't actually used the MovieBox, but came here to read reviews on it.

However, I have been using Studio 8 for a while with another capture device and have also experience the audio out of synch problem.

I have found a work-around that works for me and have been posting it everywhere I see other comments on the problem.

The answer is to NOT allow the hardware to capture the audio. Rather than connecting the RCA audio to the box, connect the audio directly to your PC's line-in jack on the soundcard. I use one of those RCA to headphone jack splitters for connecting a portable CD player to a sound system. Then you set the audio capture source in the Studio program from the breakout box to line-in.

I was pulling my hair out like everyone else until I stumbled upon this solution (by attempting to capture with Adobe Premiere which doesn't recognize my hardware as an audio input). Since I've been doing it this way, I have made about a dozen DVD's, with lengths from 10 min to 1 hour with perfect audio synch.

Maybe it will work for you guys who've already bought the software. If you haven't bought it yet, though, look elsewhere.

I received the MovieBox for Christmas 2003 and have spent about 40 hours with it. First to pros. It is easy to install, captures video flawlessly, and the editing software (Studio 8) is fantastic. Being able to take 3 hours of home videos (which like everyone's included things that in hindsight didn't turn out great) and cut it down to an hour+ of fun scenes, add music and digital photos was worth every penny.

The negatives. MovieBox only imports audio in mpeg format. I didn't even know this mattered until I went to make a DVD and I ran into the out of sync problem where the sound is 1 second behind the video. The product claims to be able to make DVDs from any source, but this audio limitation is a real problem. Second, my video ended up being 75 minutes long. Studio 8 appeared to burn the disc properly, using a lower quality setting to fit it all on the disk, but when the disc is played in a DVD player random sections of video are missing. Pinnacle says you can only put an hour on a DVD, which is a stupid and erroneous claim. Lastly, the support on this product is horrendous.

Luckily there is a fix. Instead of using Studio 8 to burn a DVD, I created an MPEG file of the video on my harddrive. This solved the audio syncing problem. I then used ULead's DVD Moviefactory (which came included with my PC) to turn the MPEG file into a DVD. It worked great. This method does require you to render the video twice, which can degrade the picture, but I didn't notice any difference in my case.

I'd call it an ok product that with some tweaks could be great.

I've had a project sitting around for about a year; to transfer a VHS tape of a newscast(involving my Mom's retirement) to DVD and send it out to my family members. After reading the reviews here on Amazon, I passed by this product this fall, but received "Pinnacle MovieBox usb" as a Christmas Gift. I love it!
The software is almost completely intuitive. OK, I tried to do my project the night after Christmas and messed it up, probably by not manually setting the software to mpeg2, but the second burn worked great and played on our 2 year old dvd player! This included two VHS tape segments, one of the newscast and one of diving in Bonaire with some 8mm waterskiing video from my old Canon camcorder. Titles were easily added.
Luckily, I saw none of the audio sync problems other people have complained about. My computer is only a year old though and pretty much new. Is a P4 2.4 gig, with 512mg ram, and a Western digital HD with 8mg buffer. MovieBox aparently "renders" projects differently depending somewhat on the speed of your machine. Not being a tech type, I can only be happy that I didn't run into any problems with MovieBox. I love the size (very slim), feel (very sturdy aluminum) and overall simplicity.

Let's start with what works. MPEG-1 capture works. But if that's all you want, then there are cheaper products available. Video capture at higher resolution is unreliable. Expect plenty of bad frames. Conversion between different formats is buggy. The video editing software is substandard and chock full of bugs. The box claims that DVDComplete is included, but it really should be called DVDIncomplete because it's just a "lite" version. It is not much more than an advertisement for the really thing (available for extra cost from Dazzle.) On top of that, DVDComplete tends to choke on ~50% of the captured files. (Ulead's authoring and editing software had no such problems with the same files.) The OnDVD program didn't even install. Customer Support can be characterized by the old joke: "Dr., it hurts when I do this."; "Then don't do that!" There is a customer forum on their web site. It's a great place to commiserate with other Dazzle customers and to get recommendations for competing products. In summary, this is not the product you are looking for.

Ok I know this product did not get very good reviews, but I came away with pretty good results, not perfect but pretty good. I think it has a lot to do with what type of system you have. I have a P4 2.66 ghz Dell with 512meg of ram and a pretty good video card the ATI Radeon 9700tx with 128 meg.I can capture mpeg 1(low res) with no problem, and even at dvd quality mpeg 2 720 by 480 it still did a decent job with hardly no frame loss, a little fuzzy at places though so it is not perfect.I came into buying this knowing that it would not be exact dvd quality and it isn't, but I have used it for a couple of weeks and have burned some pretty nice and very watchable dvd's. also I had little trouble hooking it up and getting it running in xp home. so if you have a fairly good system able to handle video and audio than this product might be for you.

stay clear. it is the worst software I have ever purchased.

I was really excited to try this product, but after hours and hours of frustration, I finally gave up. On the surface, the GUI interface is very slick and it seems like Studio 8 could do everything I wanted (record analog video, edit, and create VCD's). It has nice editing features that are fairly intuitive. However, the application locked up or crashed regularly (I installed v8.8). You can use the auto-save feature to help minimize loss of work. When it was running, I was constantly encountering little quirks and made the user's experience frustrating. Plus, it was painfully slow on my PC (P3, 1GHz, 384MB RAM, WinME). Pinnacle should reduce the GUI 'fanciness' and work on making it run faster and smoother. It seems that it would be a great product, if it worked as promised. My recommendation: Wait for Studio 10!

The card and software installation went smoothly. I burned my first test cd within 30 minutes. (about 10 minutes in length)
There is a few seconds pause when I click on a drop-down box, but other than that everything worked fine. My machine is a 1.73 ghz Athlon, 640 mb ram, Windows XP Home. I would suggest reading the manual and using a pretty fast computer.

Initially I thought the editing process was easy to use with the drag and drop timeline and individual picture advancement setting. It also made the addition of audio easy to coordinate with pictures. Preview process always looked great but I could never get the final slideshow to advance on DVD player. It was a waste of time and countless CDs just to try to get a slideshow to work. As far as tech support, the company is non-existent. Get it if you want to be frustrated.

I got this software free from purchasing a Dazzle 10 in 1 reader/writer.

I do agree with one of the reviewers about requiring patience in using this software. It does work once its quirks are discovered.

1. Slideshow does not advance - I had this issue and I think the cause of this is that the first frame gets inadvertently highlighted before burning the CD. In effect, this makes the frame/picture, the only one viewable. Now, I make it a point that no frame is highlighted before burning the VCD by clicking out of the timeline.

2. 200 picture file limit - When pictures are imported into the project, a physical copy of the picture file is brought over into the project directory. My workaround to ensure that 200 files were actually being used was to actually copy the files physically into the project directory.

3. Writing VCD - After a few coasters which seemed like finished products, I slowed down the write speed on my DVD writer from 16X (max speed of my writer) to 8X. This produced good VCDs that actually play to completion. The coasters do not play to completion and on my DVD player that plays most every format, it just does not play at all which was surprising to me. This hinted that something was amiss with how the VCD was burned.

The downsides of this software:

1. Pictures cannot be moved in blocks when in the timeline. Pictures have to be moved one by one.

2. Auto arrange cannot be applied to a certain block of pictures with respect to audio. It's all or nothing.

If your looking for an EASY way to make a DVD picture show and a GREAT price, ONDVD is for you. You take your pictures, you import them into ONDVD (very easy to do either 1 picture at a time or the entire directory) and your all set! You can even import music (MP3 or Wav files) and insert them in your picture show. One important note - it's probably better to use a CD RW blank CD when burning your picture show. Most DVD's will accept a CD RW and not a regular CD R. You can't beat the LOW PRICE and EASE of use!

The program won't do motion menus, and it tells you when you start up that it wants to run with only a few colors instead of normal resolution so you know that it isn't very advanced. Then I have tried several different hardware configurations and I am using XP with several different codec settings and the dumb program keeps crashing, I'm not really into updating into the beta versions of software but I think you going to have to in order to get your moneys worth out of this program. I have gotten it to work with really common compression settings like Microsft DV AVI but nothing else though and really small movies, not large ones. I'd say it's more like $10 rather than $500.

The features supposedly supported by this program sound great, but the program crashes or errors out every time. A major disappointment for a piece of software this expensive.

Bottom line: There isn't any decent DVD authoring software yet that doesn't cost thousands of dollars. If you want to burn decent DVDs right now, use a Mac!

I BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT AND WAS AMAZED BY ALL ITS FEATURES, I WOULD RECOMMEND IT TO ANYONE

There are many things wrong with this product. As an A+ Certified tech, installation should be a piece of cake. Wrong. It has been a couple of days and no go. I will have to hook it up to one of only 2 USB ports on the motherboard to see if that would work but with a powered USB hub, it will not. But the big surprise is the (what I feel)lack of product support. You have a choice of 1. a forum 2. faq 3. email. The manual is all of 8 pages and it starts on Page 2. Better to use a PCI capture card and leave the USB headaches behind.

Actually a mixed review from my experience. I found it easy to install (with a Sony Vaio > Sony camcorder as my gear). In fact I had a DVD made with some cool special effects in under four hours from opening the box. I am not much of a computer hack either, so easy to use. Hence four stars for this half pf the review.
HOWEVER....manual and support is VERY slim. Also certain to read the product info closely (as I did not - stupid bear) as you can only go from analog to digital and not the other way around. Now I have some DVDs that only certain family members can use and I am looking hard at the Dazzle Hollywood as another investment ([price] plus) to be able to edit on my Vaio and return to VHS. I will probably review that product in a week or so, so if you want to make use of my trial and error (or success) hang on.....

First of all. Are you wondering if you should buy Pinnacle (8 or 9, the same thing)? Are you looking for a functional or at least friendly editing software? I can give you the answer!

STAY THE HELL AWAY FORM THIS TREMENDOUS CRAAAAP!!!!

Pinnacle made me cry, and I'm not joking or exagerating. It made me cry, when I lost my 43-min project when I'd just reached half of it... Also when I was doing the final render, and WITHOUT MY PERMISSION it'd just change the audio tracks, turn one song into another, repeat video files I didn't even include (sometimes I was just wating for it to include video files I hadn't even captured!), it goes wacko, crazy, mad, lunatic...it's frustrating. Not to mention all those times where I just layed too much of my trust on it, didn't saved every single thing I did and it'd just crash and end itself.

Why oh why, did I EVER thouhgt of buying this? Please listen to me, listen to us all and don't make the same mistake we did. DIE PINNACLE.

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!
Version 9 is even worse.

Studio 8 has much to recommend it conceptually. It is one of the most comprehensive video capture, editing, and burning programs, and it offers a user-friendly approach to all of these jobs. That is, it would be user-friendly if it worked reliably, but it is the "buggiest" program I have ever owned. One has only to read the "forum" on Pinnacle's Web pages to discover some of the many flaws in the program. The version 8.0 that I purchased about a month ago has a new Beta revision that is numbered 8.5.20. I am still using 8.5.18, which I would not consider ready for Beta testing. The audio capabilities of this program were one of my reasons for purchasing it; however, the version I am using was presented with a disclaimer acknowledging that audio was disabled in the new version, and this most recent Beta version does not purport to correct the problem.
In the process of creating a one hour DVD, I experience - on average - 6 crashes. There are few internal error messages, however, that might suggest corrections.
And worst of all, there is no voice support. There is, ostensibly, an e-mail support system. I received one response from them. That response was not useful, arrived too late in any case. The first response from their support pages, as well as the e-mail I received, is a string of suggestions about problems with other programs, the system, or the user. For a program in this price range and with this many bugs to offer no options - not even paid - for voice support is inexcusable.
I strongly advise that no one purchase this program until these problems have been addressed.

The only good thing about this product is the software (Studio 8). I bought a DVC 150. I spent two days trying to get Tech support, and 45 minutes on long distance toll calls to their version of tech support (they do not offer toll free service). Their tech suggested that I use a 1394 setup for better quality and ease of use. They never did answer the email I sent for assistance 4 days ago.
I paid $150.00 for this piece of junk desk orniment. A firewire card and cable is only $75.00 at Best Buy. And I have been able to down load my grandson's birthday from my Sharp Digital Viewcam just like I wanted to with out unnecessary grief and agrivation.

This was the 2nd and last Dazzle product I'll ever buy. The first was the "Snazzi" capture card which ceased to work under Win 2K, then this product ceased to work under Windows XP. Dazzle must be playing tricks with interrupts and other low level hardware to make these things incompatible.

Buh bye Dazzle, see you in Chapter 11.

I would recommend that you quickly repackage this product if you purchased it and return it before the warrantee expires. I made the mistake of purchasing this product last year and have never been able to make it work correctly. I tried to install it on a 450 Mhz Dell and a 1.6 Mhz Dell w/ Windows XP. I couldn't even get it to start up or install correctly on the windows XP. On the 450 Mhz machine I was able to install it and actually load some video into the program using the interface. However, I was never able to get it to successfully edit the imported video. The downloads for Dazzle says it all. It never has worked well if at all with Windows XP. ... Try Pinnacle or anything else.

I was so thrilled to convert by VHS tapes to DVD until I discovered that even my 80 gig hard drive was not enough for a 20 minute video AND once I had the AVI video and tried to burn the DVD the software said I had to go to dazzle.com to PURCHASE a $100 upgrade. The hardware and bundle only cost $40! There is no tech support effective 10/24/03 for any Dazzle DVC 80 Movie Star v. 5. Therefore, you use up your hard drive and can't off load it anyway. What a waste! You have to delete the capture that took you 5 hours to produce. LOSER!

I've had nothing but trouble with this product. The XP version is very buggy and virtually unusable. Even with the latest patches, the software simply does not function. I cannot recommend this product to anyone.

I like this software because it was easy to use. There is interactive help for it available online. There are a few issues with it,however. The titling and Intro screens are clunky and not good quality. The voice over requires a recording program, which I found online called Goldwave, which is EXCELLENT! The MPEG2 recording would not play on all CD readers and the write to CD function didn't work on my machine. For the money it's not bad, there aren't alot of choices out there for this kind of software at the consumer level.