Rating: 
Summary: Unbelievably poor product - buy Canopus instead
Review: With high hopes and lots of enthusiasm, I made the decision to buy Pinnacle Studio Deluxe 8. Many user reviews around the web complain about how bad the installation process was. I decided to roll the dice and hope for the best (after all, I used to write Windows device drivers and some installation products for a living).Boy did I get hosed. It's never a good sign when the standard installation tells you to repeatedly ignore the New Hardware Wizard dialog while the installer tries to automagically install driver software. It's also not good when the software on the CD's is known buggy but there's no installation instruction saying "check our website first for necessary updates, lest you get hosed by our updates not fully being able to uninstall earlier installations". I wish I could say it's a short story, but a total of 18 hours worth of failed installations over 2 weeks (working with Pinnacle's tech support) still yields the unrecognized card and hodge-podge installed Pinnacle drivers that can't see the driver. Of course, their uninstaller software doesn't properly uninstall, so repeated installations mean having to manually delete files off disk, run registry cleaning utilities, multiple reboots, etc all under Pinnacle's tech support instruction. Save yourself the time, hassle, money, and just buy the Canopus ADVC-1394 instead of this not-ready-for-primetime product; the Canopus card literally just plugs in and WORKS right out of the box. No funky driver installations, no repeated multiple uninstall/re-installs, no swapping multiple CD's and software update patches, etc.
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