Rating: 
Summary: Pinnacle 9...possibly the most frustrating program EVER
Review: Pinnacle's line of Studio products are like a youthful blushing bride...full of sweet promises, amazing beauty, and hopeful thoughts of a wonderful future together. Until you marry her. Then your days turn to nightmares and and you find yourself pounding your head against a wall, wondering how something that looked so great could be so incredibly bad.Folks...RUN, do not walk, away from this product. DO NOT be fooled by the great interface, the intuitive workflow, the incredible ease of editing, the hundreds of features that could make creating and editing DVD's the easiest thing you've ever done. Here's the gospel, folks...THE DAMN THING SIMPLY DOESN'T WORK. If you don't believe me, check out the user forums on Pinnacle's own website. It will take you 99% of the way (including 6 hours of rendering for a 1 hour DVD) and then REFUSE TO CREATE YOUR DVD. You just want to throw the freaking thing against a wall. Then you try to look at the user forums to see what the answer to your problem is and THERE ISN'T ONE. The program is just buggy and doesn't work most of the time. And before you cast aspersions on my system, I have an Intel P4 processor running on an Intel mobo with half a gig of RAM and a brand new ATI All in Wonder video card. The hard drive I use for video is a new 250 GB Western Digital. This computer runs everything...it ought to run this. This has the potential to be one of the greatest products ever made, and exactly in the right place at the right time. Sonic MyDVD is too simplistic and hard to edit with (even though I created about 10 DVD's in three days before falling in love/hate with Studio). Movie Maker 2 won't author DVD's. Adobe Premier is too expensive, and you have to add Encore to author DVD's. Nero and Roxio are not full featured enough. Nope...Pinnacle 9 is the perfect program in the perfect place at the perfect time. It has everything you could want...except the ability to make a DVD without driving you freakin' bonkers. The interface is divided into 3 parts, Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. Capture allows you to capture in DV, MPEG 2 (DON'T!!!. Just don't. NEVER use the MPEG 2 feature. It doesn't work) You can have it chop your video up into scenes based on a set time duration, the time of the scene in the camera (digital) or the video content itself. This feature works. Once captured, you go to the Edit tab, where it is stupid easy to drag the video clips onto a timeline or storyboard...your choice. You can then apply fades, dissolves, or dozens of cool transitions between the scenes. You can easily chop parts out, split scenes, and rearrange things. The timeline view, especially, is amazingly easy and fun to use. You can add voiceovers or background music from CD, mp3, or .wav files on your computer. You can make the image brighter or increase the contrast or change the color saturation. You can speed it up or slow it down. You can add titles from dozens of cool looking presets or make your own. You can apply effects, fades, disolves, etc to the titles. You can add still pictures. You can add effects, you can do damn near anything. Now we get to part 3...Make Movie. Here is where this product falls from 5 to 1 stars. Take your hours of work, your edits and fades and transitions and try to burn them onto a DVD. I dare you...just try. I will say that you do have other choices...you can turn your creation into an MPEG that you can play on your computer, or a DV that you can feed back into your camcorder via Firewire, or stream, or "share", whatever that is. But what you want to do is to create a DVD and use that cool new burner your got, right? So you tell it "best video quality" and hit the "Make DVD" button. And now we stop. And we go and do something else for FIVE OR SIX HOURS while we "render"...a phrase you will soon learn to hate. I will say at this point that Sonic MyDVD does this part in about 30 minutes...this "rendering" and the output looks great and the menu works and all is well. So remember...30 minutes versus 5 hours. And after rendering for five or six hours, odds are that your big badass machine will simply...stop. It will crash and will not even have the decency to give you an error message to tell you why. You will just come back the next morning expecting a DVD and it won't be there. Why? BECAUSE THE PROGRAM DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!!!!!! Don't take my word....go to http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docsupport1.asp?division_id=1&langue_id=2&product_id=1501&product_name=Studio%20version%209%20&page_id=86 and look at what the users have to say. One guy was even talking about a class action lawsuit somewhere in there. There are people in there professing years of experience designing and building software who can't understand how Pinnacle could release this and put their name on it. Trust me...its ugly. Problems do NOT get solved. And if you want a full history, check out the forums for Pinnacle 8, where the screaming is at full volume. And there sits the wise Pinnacle staff saying, in effect, Pinnacle 9 is not a miracle fix, and probably won't be any better. Damn skippy. And these are user forums where Pinnacle employees routinely log on to answer questions. And while you are there, have a quick look at some of the arrogant, condescending replies that the techs give to the user's questions. Also, note the tone of the users...they are just really really frustrated because the program doesn't work. Some of the workarounds are comical. "Rearrange some of the scenes....a scene might be corrupt"..."cut the movie up into smaller parts, render them, and then combine them back together into the movie you want"..."defrag your hard drive". And the sad thing is that sometimes they work. I have used Studio 8 and Studio 9, and all I have done is edit my home movies (captured through a DV camcorder straight into Studio), chopped out the boring parts, added a few transitions and titles and a menu. I HAVE NEVER ONCE GOTTEN PINNACLE TO TAKE THIS INFO AND BURN IT ONTO A DVD without several coasters, and doing some goofy workaround that adds ANOTHER five hours to the process. I use this product because I am a junkie...a willing participant in an abusive relationship, and here I sit with my bruised bicep, torn tank top, and black eye telling the cops "I'm okay...I just know he'll change someday and stop kicking my ASS." Yes, I am hooked like Marion Barry. But please heed my pathetic example, and RUN, DO NOT WALK away from this frustrating, maddening, buggy, half baked, kludge piece of garbage. Until the next upgrade, man...I just KNOW the next upgrade is gonna fix the problems, man...I just know it. I just know it...I just...hey man...spare change?
Rating:
Summary: Disappointment
Review: Seemed to work fine.... hours of editing only to find video and audio out of sync. Thought I had a good tape back up only to find shake and studder in various places. Don't purchase!
Rating: 
Summary: A lot of bugs
Review: Studio 9 has a lot of nice features, but it's loaded with strange bugs. This is particularly disappointing because I upgraded from Studio 8 to get away from a lot of bugs. Pinnacle Systems needs to focus their efforts on improving product quality and stop worrying about matching features from Roxio and Ulead. So far, I've dealt with mismatched audio, failures to load existing AVI files, crashes during menu editing and crashes during rendering. Error messages are terrible -- no information on what happened. Support has been OK. Submitted a question and received and answer in about 12 hours. Not sure they really read my submission though. They suggested several fixes that didn't apply to my situation. Don't know if I could recommend this product yet. I'm trying to create a project for a team I mentor and I'm about to hit the deadline. I'm hoping they'll come out with a patch soon. Unfortunately, it looks like the products from Roxio and Ulead have just as many problems.
Rating:
Summary: Really, just an awful product
Review: Terrible product from a truly awful company. Do yourself a favor and just don't enter the world of frustration that is Pinnacle Systems. I hope this company goes out of business soon.
Rating:
Summary: YIKES!! Run, do not walk, to the nearest EXIT!!
Review: TERRIBLE! This software is so full of quirks. After I worked HOURS through about a hundred "bugs", went through (wasted) a dozen cd's and dvd's, I finally produced a somewhat acceptable video, only to find that I CANNOT GET IT TRANSFERRED TO A DVD!! First the picture comes through, but no audio, then no picture on parts and no audio. Three calls to so-called "tech-support" yielded three different solutions, none of which has worked. AAAAARGGGGGHH!! Save your money! Unless you don't mind the mind-numbing frustration!
Rating: 
Summary: Good when it works
Review: The good part is that Studio 8.10 is far better than other programs I've tried at actually building a movie. I can easily slice, dice, rearrange scenes, add titles, and add background music. The bad part is that the software is unstable and requires three patches to get it going correctly. Then, if you dare install a different DVD burner, it won't let you uninstall, you have to reinstall the program on top of itself. Yes, I've had it freeze, or give strange error messages after I've done my movie and selected File, Exit. The bottom line? I'd be much happier if the software recognized new burners without a lot of problems. I just went from a Memorex 2.4 DVD+R/RW burner to a TDK indiDVD 8X/4X all formats internal DVD burner. I like the flexibility of Studio, but am not a happy camper with the incompatibility, lockups, and inability to uninstall the software. Would I buy it again? Yes, if I could find it for about $30. In case you're wondering, I've also tried Ulead VideoStudio 6 and Magix Movies on CD&DVD 2004. The Ulead product is confusing. The Magix product is very confusing. I just wish Pinnacle could build a better product. BTW, my system is hand built with 2 Maxtor 80 GB hard drives, ASUS MB, AMD 1800, 1 GB RAM, Win2K SP4, FireWire, USB2, 128 MB ATI board, all happily sitting in an Antec Sonata case.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste your Money!!!
Review: The software only version is a complete waste of money! It does not support their own Dazzle products, such as DCS 200. Customer service is fast and absolutely no help. If you feel lucky, buy the software AND hardware product. Personally, I'm taking my money to Vegas. It's a safer bet!!
Rating:
Summary: Just burn the $80.
Review: The worst yet. I've used 7,8 and now 9, only becaused they promised a better software package. I have a new state-of-the art Sony with 200G hard drive and it still freezes. Spend your money on Sony's Screenblast, or get a Mac and use Final Cut Pro.
Pinnacle really SUCKS.
Rating:
Summary: Most Unstable Program EVER
Review: This is absolutely the most unstable software I have ever experieced. I use LOTS of different software from business databases to Microsoft Office to all the professional Adobe products and have NEVER experienced the crashes (still ongoing) that I have with this program. Pinnacle's constant answer is turn everything else off in the task manager. Funny that Adobe Premier video doesn't need to do that or any other program I have. I defragged my hard drive and made it worse. I upgraded from 8 to 9 and still am walking on egg shells. Do you like the color BLUE as in the windows crash screen??? Use this program. By the way, this is all occuring on a new, extremely well equipped Dell.
Rating:
Summary: How can they sell this pile of crap?
Review: This is the most buggy software I have ever used. It has three main modes, capture, edit and make movie. I have experienced freezes and crashes in all three modes. Whats's strange is that sometimes (rarely) the product will work. I previosly used studio 7 and it ran without a hitch. I upgraded because I wanted to author DVD's from home video. I don't understand how they can sell this thing. I'm looking for something else.
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