Rating: 
Summary: Lots of Trouble with this One
Review: After using this for a short time, the Dazzle capture device quit working. Customer service sent me a three page e-mail of things to do, including removing all USB software, registry editing, etc. Until they get the bugs out, I would avoid this like the plague.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly engineering product - refuses to start.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: SETUP learning curve but beats anything in simplicity
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Picture perfect
Review: I bought a AverMedia EZMaker DVD PCI card and was disappointed with the quality... the price was great, but video where the camera was in motion (panning left to right, for example) was very pixellated. The NeoDVD software that came with it was horrible; it dropped frames so all my videos looked like the scary part from "The Ring". Using Roxio's Easy DVD Creator software was better, but still pixelated.
So I took a chance and bought Pinnacle Systems Studio AV/DV 9 from the local Best Buy ($10.00 more than the Amazon price, but I figured I could return it easier if I wasn't happy with the quality.)
The picture is DVD-perfect.. I can't complain at all, it just looks great. The Studio 9 software that comes with it is awesome, full-featured enough for professional movies, it seems to me. The only complaint I could possibly make is the rendering speed. I have a medium-quality system (1.1GHz with 512M RAM) and a top quality Video card (ATI Radeon Pro) and rendering a half hour of mixed video to DVD takes well over an hour and a half. Burning the finished product to DVD takes about 15-20 minutes. But even the time is not a big deal; I just set it to burn before I go to bed and when I wake up it's done.
I had absolutely no problems with installation or setup, it was up and running in less than 20 minutes. Be warned that video editting is a HardDrive HOG. The Studio 9 software came on a CD and a DVD. An hour's worth of video takes up many GiGs of drive space!
So the Pinnacle Systems Studio AV/DV 9 card works great, and the software alone is worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: Better than the consensus
Review: I bought this 1 week ago and it works well. I've made 6 DVDs from old video tapes already. I bought an excellent MPC Millenia 910i computer capable of using this package in November, mostly to get SVHS home videos onto DVD, and was scared to buy Studio with AV capability because of the Amazon and other reviews, and by the many complaints on the Pinnacle forum. I've had problems from tape anomalies. The package has crashed, but Studio 9 and the AVDV board seem not to have introduced problems. I'm pretty sure that many of the complaints are from people with less (or less well designed) computers than my MPC (2.6GHz, 512MB, 120GB single hard drive, XP). Pinnacle's staff seems to have been stung by the previous "lousy support" comments. They seem to be trying to fix problems.
There have been two patches since Studio 9 came out -- it probably won't work without them for some people. As I watch the files eat up hard drive I think how ambitious the making of videos is. I can't have anything else running and I throw away old disk files and defragment the hard drive before every big session. I wish I had two drives. Studio 9 makes editing easy, although I read the manual a lot to learn the many features. I'm working as hard as the computer, but doing this work with Studio 9 is very enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Dissapointed with Pinnacle
Review: I have owned Studio AV 8 since it came out. I tried to buy Studio 9 and placed an order with Pinnacle but never received a reply or the product. Oringinally my version 8 worked well after I solved a few problems by removing and reinstalling software a couple of times. I was trying to buy the version 9 because the analog video capture quit working (can't hold sync) when I applied the latest update to 8. Pinnacle is TOTALLY unresponsive to their customers!! I do not consider myself a novice having made many VHS to DVD conversions but would not by Pinnacle again!
Rating: 
Summary: Good Product, Bad Tech Support, Marginal Manual
Review: I have to say that the product does work. In fact, it works pretty well, but because the manual doesn't really cover a lot of the basic problems in setting up the card and the program, I recommend caution in buying this product. If you have computer knowledge and certain degree of perseverance, this is for you. If you get intimidated by changing windows system settings, monkeying around in your device manager and cleaning your registry, you might want to think twice. On the plus side, the firewire capture worked very well the first time and its pretty easy to do. The analog capture is more difficult to get figured out, but it works well too once you're set up correctly. You'd better have a lot of hard drive space - like an extra 20 gig for a 90 minute video. I had to contact technical support on a couple of relatively minor issues and found out that technical support is pretty bad. You can get support via email (you need to have your serial number handy to do this). I don't recommend going this route, however, because it's a 24 hour turn-around for each question and response. And the responses are awful -- just quotes from the manual. "Make sure all background programs are closed." "Make sure your chipset drivers are updated." "Make sure you defrag your hard drive..." It goes on and on. And they won't give you a substantive answer until you promise you have done all of the "stock" things that the manual already tells you to do. I'm on day 4 with email tech support over a green line that showed up on one of my captured videos. The tech support person keeps giving me one more little "task" to do before he will address the issue of why there is a line on one video capture but not others. Email support is abysmal in its helpfulness. Telephone support, on the other hand, isn't bad. I would like to give you the technical support telephone number, but its against Amazon's rules. That's a shame, I could have saved you 20 minutes because that's how long it will take you to find it. From what I can tell you get your first call free and they want $30 for all subsequent calls. Ouch! That hurts, especially when the manual doesn't tell you how to actually capture video using the S-video connector. (You've got to make a change to a setting at an odd place in the software and its not addressed in the manual or in the help file that comes with the product.) My bottom line is that the product works, but you have to be ready to take your lumps on the technical support side. I've transferred a couple of home videos from MiniDV format as well as a kid's vhs tape for use as a svcd. I'm happy with both. Now that I'm past the initial learning curve, I hope I can enjoy the product more. If you're the faint of heart type or don't have a bunch of computer experience, this product is probably not for you. Once its up and running you're fine, but there is a lot of "tweaking" required to get to that point and you can't expect much help from Pinnacle.
Rating:
Summary: A first-time digital editor using Pinnacle - 1/8/05
Review: I received this gift for Christmas - the Pinnacle Studio AV/DV version 9.1 with the PCI video card. I was all excited about this gift, because we have a bunch of 8mm video of our little Hannah, then I went on amazon.com and a bunch of other places and saw the reviews on this... then wasn't as excited. But I thought - what the heck, it's a gift, and looking on the other options (i.e. Ulead, Sony Vegas), they seemed way too expensive when this package had the PCI card and software all in one - so I decided to try it out anyways.
First, a little more background: I have no other video editing experience, so this is new to me. Also, computer specs: I am running a computer with 2GB RAM, 80GB hd, Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor. Running Windows XP Professional with SP2 installed, as well as other software (i.e. virus, firewall, backup, etc.)
Thus far, here are my summary thoughts (1/8/05): This hardware/software package worked as well as I would have expected - very satisfied. No complaints thus far, though I have not yet burned a DVD - will post once I do that. 2/13/05: I have just burned my first DVD (it took awhile for other reasons), and everything went well. There were a few quirks (see below), but nothing that would change me from enthusiastically recommending this!
Detailed thoughts:
First, I installed the software per the instructions. The install worked very cleanly - I had no problems with installing, though installing took a bit of a long time (especially the DVD bonus effects that come with the set). Previous reviews had mentioned that there were some errors with XP and SP2 - I had none (I even checked that yes, I am still running *!?$* SP2). Install never crashed or stalled or anything. The install also updated the software automatically (even when I ran the software and checked for updates, there were none).
Next was installing the hardware (PCI card). Piece of cake, no problems. Rebooted machine, placed CD into machine for device drivers, no problems. (note that the install here adds about twenty-seven new registry items by my count.)
This morning I ran the software and captured from an analog RCA input. I made sure to hook up the RCA video to the video in and the RCA audio to my PC's audio in with the adapter included with this package (note that you will still need your own RCA male-male cables). Captured a 20 second video with audio, and it captured very cleanly. Added some transitions and background music to some scenes, and published to MPEG - no problems, everything worked as it should. The only complaint I would have is that the output was a little fuzzy, but I think that had more to do with my settings - will post more once I get time to play with the software more.
Now that I have burned my DVD, here are my thoughts from that: It was very easy to burn the DVD, although the "burn directly" function didn't seem to work. I had to compile the DVD and the burn it to DVD through separate functions - still easy, but one more intermediate step. Either way, it should be noted that compiling the DVD takes some time - on my machine, 1.5 hours of DVD material took about 1.3 hours to compile (so set it to go and go do something else for awhile). But I think that's to be expected given the compression methods. The other quirk is that my DVD writer is a DVD+RW, but my own DVD player doesn't read +RW, only -RW, so I would suggest checking to make sure your DVD player can read your DVD type (www.videohelp.com is a great help in this).
Rating:
Summary: Never made it work
Review: I spent several weeks trying to get this product to work and finally gave up. Technical support, as many have indicated, is a joke. It took them 12 days to respond to my first email. After that it was a response every 2 days. Basically, my system never recognized the card. Windows never popped up the New Hardware dialog, and there was nothing under device manager. I uninstalled everything and tried the install again, but no luck. I downloaded patches, and new drivers, but nothing worked. Mean while, tech support was just sending me canned answers, and not even reading my emails. If you look at the chat on pinnacles web site, there are a lot of frustrated users trying to make this product work. There is also a lot of talk about how the product does not work correctly with XP Service Pack 2.
Rating:
Summary: Some things work most don't...
Review: I was very disappointed with the functionality and performance of this product.
For the first few months after I purchased Studio AV/DV Deluxe I had NUMEROUS crashes and much of the program didn't work. After pinnacle released a few patches and instructed me to "clean my registry" to update things I got some things working better however nothing works quite as promised. I still have yet to get this to encode things in motion-JPEG format as the package indicated it could!
The program let me capture video (after hours of tweaking settings and disabling other programs) at a fairly high data rate (high quality video) however when I went to burn the footage onto DVD, the program would automatically RE-encode everything at a very LOW data rate- resulting in fairly poor quality images. One of the main reasons that I purchased this equipment was to archive home movies in a high quality format. To date I have only been able to archive footage at low quality- even after months of discussion with customer support.
I have had better luck using the crippled Ulead utility that came bundled with my DVD-burner that using this.
Save your money to buy something else.
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