EXPRESSION

Rating:
Summary: Not Thrilled
Review: I had been using Dazzle DVD Complete which provided fairly regular upgrades, and checked their site for an update only to find a Pinnacle webpage offering a $40 upgrade from DVD Complete to Expression. Apparently they have taken Dazzle over and won't be supporting the product. So I ordered it ... me=idiot. Didnt do enough research and found that its the equivalent of "My First DVD Software" There is no way to create a professional looking DVD -which is what I use it for. Its basically for newbies who want to throw old videos of their kids on a DVD and send it to the folks.

That, I admit is my own fault for not further researching, but I am a software junkie and was impulsive. BUT, as far as Pinnacle's marketing it as an upgrade? UPGRADE???? Would you consider going from Photoshop 7.0 to Microsoft Draw an upgrade? Pinnacle obviously would.

Rating:
Summary: Very bad experience using it
Review: I usually do not write comments but this time I feel I have to write something about it, because I am really disappointed the Pinnacle Expression. I used it to create a DVD-R using existing well-coded Mpeg2 files, but it is very very slow, regardless in Pentium IV 1.8GHz or Pentium III 600 MHz, two of my PC's. One thing really puzzled me was, in either PC, the CPU usuage was only about 25-30 percent. And the program IS running, not non-responding. No huge I/O activity. No DVD buring activity either. Then why isn't it running faster, to use 100% CPU??? It took one hour, only incrementing from 50% to 52% complete in preparing the DVD contents, not even the burning yet-- a separate process. And then it always errored out at about 70%, "Error to Complie File", something like it. Stupid. I am an IT professional myself. I keep my PC environment simple. There're enough memory and hard disk space in my PC's. There's no registry mess up. If there's anything wrong, it must be the program (I already downlaoded the lastest update from Pinnaclesys.com). I am very disappoined. It is such a straightforward and simple program yet they don't know how to code it well.

Rating:
Summary: Neverending story of frustration.
Review: I've bought this product expecting that if I have already encoded file in Mpeg-2 it will be easy to create simple menu for my own home video, according all information I discovered from Pinnacle web site. But, unfortuanately, you cannot create a DVD, which will fit to 4.7 Gb blank. If you try to create a DVD from avi file it may take forever (couple of hours) just to create a DVD files. Final quality is really bad, you will have 700 Mb or ever more of free space left on your blank disc, but the "Expression" will show you that there's no space left.

One time it created a DVD with for me where the total size of all files was about 1 Gb, but program showed that there was no space left!

The program is really unstable, as all other Pinnacle products.

I have Pinnacle Studio 8 also with the same set of problems:
- poor video quality
- wrong calculation of free space on DVD
- unexpectable slow performance.

If you want DVD authoring software Expression is not the right choice. And I will give you the same advice if you decide to buy Pinnacle Studio. I do not expect from them any improvement in version 9. The most recent reviews just awful.

P.S. If you think that my system is slow, here is draft spec:
p4-2.4 GHz, 1Gb RAM, 7200rpm 120 Gb Hard drive... Yeah, really slow system for Pinnacle.