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?
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.
Do not fall for the condescension seen in "Works for me." Studio 9 is built upon the code base for Studio 8, which was/is notoriously difficult to get running reliably in many cases. This was not limited to underpowered, overloaded, outdated systems running aging operating systems, as the reviewer would have you believe.During the course of my experimentation with Studio 8, I built a new system from handpicked, quality components, a fast, modern processor, 1gig of ram, 2 120-gig hard drives and Windows XP Professional. It has all the latest Windows, bios and component driver updates, absolutely no programs other than Studio running, and there are still problems when using the program the way that it's hyped in the advertising.
To be successful, you're forced to restrict yourself to a rigid recipe which specifies the data format, sequence of operations and workarounds which are far from the quick and easy steps shown in product demos. Even where you've gotten past the crashes, lockups and freezes, and are able to actually write a DVD, audio and video frequently lose sync in longer projects.
Studio 8/9 can be a wonderful program, if you're one of the lucky ones. Is it worth countless hours (no exaggeration) of aggravation to find out? Download a trial version when it's offered. If that doesn't work, don't assume that the retail version will. And don't assume that Studio 9 addresses the problems that existed in Studio 8 -- one of the Pinnacle techs freely stated in the support forum that version 9 is not a bug fix for 8. New features & old problems? Time will tell. Do you want to take that chance?
If you buy this, put it on a credit card, try it out for a reasonable amount of time. Go to the pinnaclesys.com online support forums and see the number of horror stories that are just like the ones you could be writing. Then demand a refund. If they balk, involve the credit card company and contest the charge. Pinnacle thinks it's doing a swell job, because users who have run away from their products are still counted in their "installed base." If you wind up running away, at least take your refund money with you.
