Rating: 
Summary: Pinnacle 8 RUINED MY LIFE.
Review: First of all. Are you wondering if you should buy Pinnacle (8 or 9, the same thing)? Are you looking for a functional or at least friendly editing software? I can give you the answer! STAY THE HELL AWAY FORM THIS TREMENDOUS CRAAAAP!!!! Pinnacle made me cry, and I'm not joking or exagerating. It made me cry, when I lost my 43-min project when I'd just reached half of it... Also when I was doing the final render, and WITHOUT MY PERMISSION it'd just change the audio tracks, turn one song into another, repeat video files I didn't even include (sometimes I was just wating for it to include video files I hadn't even captured!), it goes wacko, crazy, mad, lunatic...it's frustrating. Not to mention all those times where I just layed too much of my trust on it, didn't saved every single thing I did and it'd just crash and end itself. Why oh why, did I EVER thouhgt of buying this? Please listen to me, listen to us all and don't make the same mistake we did. DIE PINNACLE.
Rating:
Summary: Would be good if it worked!
Review: The good: Pinnacle Studio is packed with features and is quite easy to use.
The bad: It's JUNK. Full of bugs even with the latest updates. It's slow too. STAY AWAY from this product!
Version 9 is even worse.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of features and easy to use
Review: I had never used video editing software before, and read a lot of reviews, both user and "expert" before settling for Pinnacle Studio Version 8.
Curiously, the 10 digit serial number was printed backwards and it took a while to figure that out. Also it was on the CD sleeve, not on the back of the book where the on screen instructions told me to locate it.
After installing (a breeze) I watched the tutorial video and then made a couple of test movies. One on fresh video footage from my Samsung mini DV camcorder, the other was a compilation of AVI video clips my folks back in Old England have e-mailed to me and I have been saving them on my hard drive.
Both movies were easy to compile and fun to do. I easily added transition effects between scenes and titles, trimmed some scenes and then rendered the whole thing. I found rendering was slow, as many other reviewers have pointed out, but that was my only complaint.
I made one test movie on a CD using MPEG2 which played fine on my DVD player. The other was a compilation of 20 and 30 second AVI movie clips, which was also very easy to put together and played perfectly on my (older) DVD player. Movies can also be made in streaming fashion to display on a web site or in formats suitable for e-mailing. The many formats available is definitley one of its strong points.
This software was pretty easy to use, with nice features allowing a complete amateur like me to impress the hell out of my friends at first try!
I accomplished all of this without any prior experience with video editing software so I give my full approval.
Rating:
Summary: Pinnacle Studio 8 Rocks!
Review: Despite of all the other bad reviews Pinnacle Studio 8 is a fine product. I got the same advise from a DVD Support site. They advised me that Studio 8 can work with their DVD burners but only if I can make the application work. Good luck! I guess i am lucky because with Studio 8 my DVD movies are of superior quality to those other video programs such as Sonic My DVD or Sony MovieShaker. Also, Studio 8 is a more complete application because enables me to edit sound as MP3 files from Real One Player together in my videos. Therefore, Studio 8 offers a more integral interface with a sexy touch for the digital video lover. I am happy with Studio 8!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Editor, not great authoring
Review: This is a great editor. Then again, you must remember to check out pinnaclesys.com to get the patches to make it updated. I had few problems with it. In the 30+ editing hours I used to make a movie, it did crash twice, but those were 30 hours of intensive use. The features that I liked best were the simple drag and drop . I give it 4 stars on the basis of an editing software.
Authoring, on the other hand, is a different story. It takes hours to encode and output to a dvd. The menus are nice, if they fit your situation(which they usually do). I needed a program with complete control over the menu.
Pros:
User friendly for average user
Transitions are easily used
Automatic shift entire assets when you drop a scene into timeline
Cheaper than version 9
Scene detection (splits movie into scenes)
Titles look good
All work retained after a crash
Cons:
It is slow detecting scenes from video
Titles are a bit difficult to arrange
Crashes
DVD burning options
My suggestion: But Pinnacle 8 instead of 9 to save some money, they are practically identical(I have both and prefer 8). Edit with PS8 and output your movie as an MPG(which takes significantly less time). Then use a program like DVD-Lab (free 30 day trial), which is made to author dvd's, to burn.
Rating:
Summary: Pinnacle Studio 8: Perfect programme
Review: Review : Marijn Bouwhuis, 14 years old, (holland)
I think it's totally ridiculous how people think of pinnacle, they are just taking the piss. It just works well and probably their computers don't function well. The people who made this reviews are very negative about pinnacle. E.g. they say that it takes a long time to open Studio 8 (Same as Pinnacle), but when I open the programme it takes about 10 seconds to open. The effects are of very good quality, and you can do a lot of combinations. It's very easy to work with Pinnacle, and maybe the people who wrote this reviews want something more professional, but I don't know what I could use in this case, I already asked many people for a better programme, but they don't know I think the people should not blame Pinnacle when they want something which is more professional. They should just instantly buy something more professional.
Now why do I think Pinnacle is a very good quality programme.
You can upload videos straight from your camera into pinnacle, it's carefully explained and very easy to perfrom. You can also upload music and put it all into your movie.
When your movie is finished it's very easy to burn it on a dvd disk, it's even possible to do this with pinnacle.
Now I made a screenshot (with the bottom PrtScSysRq) of pinnacle studio 8. As if you can see it looks easy to work with. You can select whatever you want; upload videos, music, photo's. It's even possible to make a menu on the beginning of the movie, so that you can select which chapter you would like to see. Isn't that cool?? There is also a possibility to put titles in it, or make something in slow-motion, which is super, because when you've done something humorous and it's on tape, you can show it in slow-motion so you may even laugh louder! All this makes Pinnacle Studio 8 fun to work with.
The review of Dean A is quite funny, but I think he's not really serious. He should become a writer, maybe he's already. It's funny because he blames Pinnacle al the time; the stages he describes are really not true. He really describes it as a very slow programme, but really it isn't, I'll take up the time now how long it takes to open: One, two, three, four, five... Just five seconds!! He just needs to buy a new computer, so Pinnacle can also open in five seconds.
Rating:
Summary: why is it bad?
Review: hi , i recently used this sofware and found it to be very good.
yes it does crash but i have never lost my work as it is all there when you start it up again, this is by far the most powerful software i have seen, but you dnt have to be a professional to use it. i reccomend it highly
Rating:
Summary: User-unfriendly garbage
Review: I will never purchase a Pinnacle product after using Pinnacle Studio 8. Like someone else's review said, unless you are doing the simplest of projects, get a different piece of software, because the hours you will spend trying to get this piece of garbage to work will cost you more than ten times the purchase price of a good program. Menus are darn near impossible to get to work correctly. Rendering is not only slow, but 9 times out of 10 stops in random spots. 75% of the time on a project longer than 10 minutes the DVD burn will fail and you've wasted a disc and the 10 hours it took to compile it all. This, of course, is if you can get through a project without the program freezing altogether. Then Pinnacle has the gall to try to get you to upgrade to a new version that fixes "SOME of the bugs". From reviews of version 9/9.1, they are just as bad. NO THANKS!
Rating:
Summary: Pinnacle 8 RUINED MY LIFE.
Review: First of all. Are you wondering if you should buy Pinnacle (8 or 9, the same thing)? Are you looking for a functional or at least friendly editing software? I can give you the answer! STAY THE HELL AWAY FORM THIS TREMENDOUS CRAAAAP!!!! Pinnacle made me cry, and I'm not joking or exagerating. It made me cry, when I lost my 43-min project when I'd just reached half of it... Also when I was doing the final render, and WITHOUT MY PERMISSION it'd just change the audio tracks, turn one song into another, repeat video files I didn't even include (sometimes I was just wating for it to include video files I hadn't even captured!), it goes wacko, crazy, mad, lunatic...it's frustrating. Not to mention all those times where I just layed too much of my trust on it, didn't saved every single thing I did and it'd just crash and end itself. Why oh why, did I EVER thouhgt of buying this? Please listen to me, listen to us all and don't make the same mistake we did. DIE PINNACLE.
Rating:
Summary: Dont buy Pinnacle
Review: Just to let you all know, Pinnacle is a waste of money. Unless you are creating very simple (and i mean simple) projects, don't buy it! I hate this program. It has so many bugs and glitches. After 20+ hours of editing my 15 minute movie, Pinnacle destroyed about 75% of it for no reason. This is Junk!!! Buy anything other than Pinnacle, trust me!!
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