Rating: 
Summary: More and more I use it, the less I like it.
Review: At first this progam looked pretty fancy with all this Oscar hype they put out. After using it for a couple days I began to think how any professional could put up with any of the bugs and how inconsistent this program works. 1)Capture - If you set the Quality of video to best, the program tells you that you have a certain amount of time for recording. This time is extremely inaccurate. The movie stops recording after 2 minutes and the program never tells you it stopped. (although you might notice that your disk free space never changes after a while - no that is not a bug) 2)Editing - program always crashing while moving scenes around. When I load a saved project, it takes about 10 min until it comes up with my project (I have an AMD 2100 with a G4 TI 4200 video card and plenty of memory). Sometimes I seem to even lose some of my edited menus and presenting frames. 3)Editing Menus - If you edit one of the pre-available menus and forgett to change the name of the menu, the program locks up. Hopefully you saved your work or you may have some problems. 4)Create disk - So far, the first disk I made seemed fine until later in the movie. The movie froze and I could only hear audio. 2nd DVD it misburned the first disk. I exited Pinnacle Studio 8.5 and the program did not save my settings I had left. When re-entering Pinnacle Studio, and again trying to create a disc (I'm already out 2 bucks) it started to render over my previously rendered video. Well there's another 4 hours out of my day. All-in-all,if you don't have the time or you don't like your time wasted, don't bother!!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Software for Digital Video
Review: Pinnacle Studio 8 is extremely amazing software. I have found that both beginners and advanced users were able to edit video so the results looked professional. Adobe Premire (...) is at a more Pro level than this software but pinnacle is well made... The Drag and drop interface is excellent for organizing your videos and making smooth transitions from one scene to the next. You'll feel like a hollywood film editor when you are preparing your scenes and producing the finished product which should come out to be exceptional. The other reviewers who said their computers crashed were either not meeting the minimum system requirements or had a system conflict that could be settled with a driver update.
Rating: 
Summary: Supports MicroMV
Review: I bought the Sony IP5 MicroMV Digital Video Camera expecting more companies to support the format. Right now it looks like Pinnacle is the only one to support it besides Sony. Ughh... Can you say Betamax? It took Pinnacle a while to get the bugs out, but I've downloaded the free upgrades and am now running version 8.7. It is one hundred times better than Sony's MovieShaker software that came with the IP5. I've made two short clips and burned both as VCDs (I don't have a DVD burner, yet). Great results both times. If you have a MicroMV get this software now. I am so thankful to Pinnacle for supporting MicroMV.
Rating:
Summary: Pinnacle 8.5 Works
Review: Run, don't walk, to this product. The formerly bug ridden software has developed into an excellent program with release 8.5. The learning curve is still there especially when working with menus, but the results are spectacular. Unlike Dazzle DVD Complete, Pinnacle Studio allows significantly more user modifiable areas and greater selections for fades, disolves, titles, etc. The only thing it lacks is an integrated label module. I have used the program for several months now and will admit my share of frustration in learning how to use it adequately. There is a very good company/user chat site which lends support and the company response and follow up has been adequate. I recently uploaded onto my computer hard drive three hours of taped vacation which I was trying to reduce to about an hour of viewable footage. Very very few frames were dropped. This does not appear to be a problem with this software. This is a good program offered for a good price.
Rating: 
Summary: Dont buy this product
Review: This product has more bugs then a tropical forest. Whats worse is their technical support department. They are the most user unfriendly department I have ever encountered. Do not buy this product.
Rating:
Summary: Best End-to End Video Editor for the Price!
Review: I use Studio 8 for quick not-to-complex projects and all of my capturing. It is very easy to learn and the output is great. This software does require a healthy computer to work efficiently. The program was a little "buggy" when working on large (greater than 20 minutes) projects. A downloaded patch removed the bugs.
The motion DVD menus are great and look very professional!
I would recommend this software to anyone considering using their camcorder to produce home DVDs for archiving. It is fast and has many enhancement features that will impress your audience.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Program with Plenty of Perks
Review: I bought this program to make a recruitment video for work. Everything worked great: Flawless DV transfer (from JVC 720U), nice music importing, all in all, a good program. This program comes loaded with lots of included scene transfers and other little extras. To give you an idea: Basically, this program includes EVERYTHING you will need to make your own episode of Seinfeld, including a narration track and commercials (if you have the time and raw footage). Initially, I had a big problem burning the finished movie to disk, until I realized I was the problem- not the program. Everything works just like it says. Word to the wise though: This program requires some hefty hardware requirements. I'm running it on a 1.8GHZ Pentium, 256 RAM with a GeForce 2 MX400. Works great on that. Have fun!
P.S. Make sure you download the new patch (pinnacle.com for version 8.21) and install the free HollywoodFX scene transfer pak.
Rating:
Summary: Rviewers... paid off? Lucky? and/or?
Review: You'd think STABILITY would factor into reviewers' outlook on an application.
The features are nice. If it happens to agree with your PC.
I lucked out and found it *usually* works ok with one of the PC's in my home. Otherwise, it's a crash-fest. All the features in the world mean nothing if you can't get the movie put together and onto a DVD. And I know all about keeping up to date with firmware, drivers, anti-virus, etc.
This program's just very shaky.
Not worth the gamble and possibly the subsequent headaches unless you buy with a money-back guarantee.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money!
Review: I must say that when this program works correctly it's great. But that's the problem....it does not always work correctly. Pinnacle Studio 8 is extremely buggy. Sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't. I have a very powerful computer and it makes no difference. Pinnacle support is worthless. Pinnacle has a huge support forum because the product is so bad. They need the support forum because the support guys don't have a clue and they are continually releasing patches to try to fix the problems. Save your money and don't buy this product.
Rating:
Summary: Good gosh, so much promise, so little realized
Review: So many hours spent. So much time on hold. So many minutes waiting for patches to download. So much WASTED TIME. ... US it would certainly be worth the money. However, if you can get even 20% of you movie making efforts to be realized onto either CD/DVD or even just rendered into a viable movie format (say something very demanding like... MPG! [lol]) then you're doing better than I. I have a plain vanilla PC; Intel CPU (1.8 GHz) and motherboard (815-based) and a fair amount of RAM (512MB). All of these far exceed the requirements. PLUS I have a fast 7200RPM hard drive with 60+GB free and it has a 8MB cache on it. ...- I thought it would at least be fair for DV editing. Don't fool yourself - I doubt there is a PC in existance that can run this program without it locking up, rebooting the PC or simply mysteriously failing (seems to be working, but never does - even after waiting 40hours to render 20mins of video). SAVE YOUR MONEY, SAVE YOUR TIME. Leave this stinker alone.
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