Rating: 
Summary: Purchase of Studio 9 - NO WAY
Review: About six months ago, I purchased Studio 8 with a bonus of a FX add-on disk. The bonus disk was not readable. After hours of emails back and forth and several promises to replace that disk, I still haven't received satisfaction. I even got hold of a real person once who promised to send a replacement but like all previous promises, this one wasn't kept.If you want to buy dissatisfaction, Studio 9 is the product for you!
Rating:
Summary: Bad NEWS, DO NOT BUY ANYTHING BY PINNALCE
Review: ACTAUL RATEING IS -***** (thats MINUS 5 stars)
TWO times dealing with Pinnacle, and I feel I need a lawyer to take them to court. They KNOWINGLY sell DEFECTIVE PRODUCTS! AND DECEIVE CLIENTS WILLFULLY!!!
They wrote a program and it's got too many bugs to fix so they make it look as if they are fixing bugs and that there is only a few minor ones, but there ARE NOT VERY MANY COMPANIES AND PROGRAMS OUT THERE THAT HAVE AS MANY BAD COSTOMER REVIEWS POSTED ALL OVER THE INTERNET>>>> DO A SEARCH FOR "BOYCOTT PINNACLE" or "WARNINGS ABOUT PINNACLE STUDIO" or any other similar input to google or what ever, on all the sites your going to find the same sort of thing, but one page I did find which must have been a paid page by pinnacle, said they think "the bugs must be confined user spacific" claiming they had no problem at all, BS, not user spacific if it's rates 90 out 100 user coments on thousands of sites as BAD NEWS!!!!! I think I know the company they used to work at, there was some other graphics software out for win3 and it had tons of problems too, like unable to reinstall, crashing and hanging, crashing windows so bad a reformatting was needed...
I just remembered, there seems to be a connection to that old one and Canon and this new one and Canon, not in documentation as being connected but the software was bundled in with the same lies, full working version of xxxxxxx, then you install it and find bugs and also find its a limited use version if you want any of the feathures you thought you were getting you had pay EXTRA THROUGH THE NOSE FOR MORE GARBAGE....
JUNKWARE................................
........JUNKWARE........................
................JUNKWARE................
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................................JUNKWARE
What do you call a company like this?¿?
Rating:
Summary: Poor Support, Released too soon
Review: Check out Pinnacle's customer support forum BEFORE buying this software. Tech support is saying "we will be fixing the installation and ops problems in version 9.1.... but we have no idea when that will be released." The other reviewers are right on. This is a company that knows how to sell, then sell extra "features", upgrade you like crazy (read: nickle and dime you), and then say "oh too bad" when their product fails miserably. Save your money. Buy something else.
Rating:
Summary: owner of studio 9
Review: DO NOT BUY IT. this program designs some code to protect it from software piracy. however, it locks customers. when i register it, i got a message telling me i got invalid serial number(i am sure i key in the correct code). and there are too much code to deal with, so i still got some function locked even though i contact the service center for help.
there are many substitude DV programs, so do not get it.
Rating: 
Summary: Bugs? There Are a Few Tricks if Studio Hangs
Review: First off, I'm about to buy Studio 9 Media Suite after having used both Studio 7 and Studio 8. My experience is that all of them are buggy, but in some respects that is not surprising given the impressive capabilities of the product. Other editors don't come close to the performance. I'm not saying the program is perfect, but I learned painfully how Studio can hang; here's how I worked around it.
I was the parent support to a group of high schoolers putting together a sports team video almost three years ago. The final version ran 32 minutes and 4.7 GB, with about ten different music tracks, about 30 video clips, and almost 300 pictures, all with special effects, titles, etc. The end product was really impressive, but the project wouldn't render. Parents had paid their money. Kids were getting ready to go away to college. I knew that Studio 7 wouldn't handle anything bigger than 4.0 GB, so I had to splice two projects onto the master (seamless with a digital camcorder).
But first I had to get it to render. On the Pinnacle web site I read someone's comment about hanging often being due to heavily edited projects - you know, adding and cutting a frame here or a frame there to get the perfect transition? So here's what I did. I printed out the storyboard/timeline data as an Excel file. It gave me all of the clips, all of the start and stop times, all of the transitions - everything I needed to to reconstruct the project. I then went back to the raw files and carefully edited them one time, using the storyboard data, and inserting them into two new projects for the two project segments. Disclaimer - downloading and printing the storyboard data was not obvious in Studio 7; I have suggested this to Pinnacle as a desirable feature but couldn't tell you if it's happened.
The entire thing then rendered perfectly on a system running an Athlon 900 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM, a Radeon 7500 video card, and 120 GB HDD space. A project like that will stress ANY system and may take hours to render, but it will work. I recommend no multitasking or background processes while rendering. I think I even disconnected my ethernet cable and shut down the antivirus and firewall.
Pinnacle Studio is very much like a British sports car - incredibly finicky, but incredible performance when it's right.
Rating:
Summary: Does He Work For Pinnacle Systems?
Review: I am happy that Robert Wright has had such good luck with Pinnacle Studio. I have not and, judging by reviews at places like ZDNet, the kind of problems I have had are more typical. The project I am struggling with now is just under 40 minutes long. It has 303 scenes in the story board, most of which are from 5 to 20 seconds in length. Simply loading the project hangs the system. I started it yesterday and waited. And waited. And waited. After 12 hours the project still had not loaded. The WinXP Task Manager said Studio.exe was using 99% of the CPU. It takes nearly 7 minutes (each time) to kill the program. I can make Studio 8 hang every time simply by selecting "open project." I have tried splitting the large project into smaller projects. Whatever causes the problem was propagated into the smaller projects. Three of four hang my system. The PC I am using is a 2.6GHz Intel Celeron with 1gig memory and two 80gig hard drives, running WinXP Home SP1. This configuration is far above Pinnacle's minimum configuration. It is entirely possible that the type of editing that Mr. Wright is doing does not invoke the many bugs I keep running into. I seriously encourage people considering buying anything from Pinnacle Systems to search a bit and read user reviews before making a decision. It may save them the time and money I seem to have wasted on Pinnacle Systems.
Rating:
Summary: Stay Away - Save Your Money $$$$
Review: I had Studio 8 and enjoyed it. I moved to studio 9 and hate it. There are lots of bugs too many to mentions. There Quality Assurance and marketing department has done a horrible product release that is full of bugs!!!! My suggestion is stick with studio 8 if you have it. Otherwise go buy another competitor product. Good Luck
Rating:
Summary: Stay Away - Save Your Money $$$$
Review: I had Studio 8 and enjoyed it. I moved to studio 9 and hate it. There are lots of bugs too many to mentions. There Quality Assurance and marketing department has done a horrible product release that is full of bugs!!!! My suggestion is stick with studio 8 if you have it. Otherwise go buy another competitor product. Good Luck
Rating: 
Summary: Pinnacle studio 8
Review: I must agree with most of the other reviews that have found problems with the studio products.
I have managed to produce some DVDs and VCDs but I find I am always fighting against the bugs and crashes that occur on most projects created.
Setting up DVD menus is impossible.
Adding a soundtrack causes crashes.
Every 3 months I upgrade my version. This solvs a couple of bugs and creates several other problems.
The last download I had to manually rename the dlls.
The time before I downloaded a 10MB patch that failed to install.
The product has lots of potentially good features let down by poor delivery.
Rating:
Summary: Think you can make DVD's from your VHShome videos? WRONG!!!
Review: I spent $150 on Studio 8 and the Dazzle 150. The box - and salesman at CompUsa - indicated this was the easiest package to burn discs from my old VHS home videotapes. Well, one week, about 30 hours, and a lot of wasted DVD's later... I'M TAKING IT BACK. Turns out there are a host of well-documented problems in the software/hardware that make it almost impossible to accomplish my simple task: most notably, there are constant synch problems between audio and video. The software makes it very easy to access the Pinnacle helpsite and a message board for the product; believe me, I'm not the only one having the problem. It became apparent that this is a huge glitch that Pinnacle is aware of... but only addresses by saying the problem will be addressed in "future versions." Meanwhile, I - and you, if you buy this product - are screwed. Reading the boards shows that others have resorted to a lot of workarounds, involving downloading different programs to do much of the work Studio 8 claims it can handle. Bottom line, no one seems to like it. Look elsewhere!!!
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