Studio DV7 is Fantastic!
Written: Jan 06 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, Includes Firewire card, Robust set of features including SmartCapture
Cons: Lacks output to Quicktime format
The Bottom Line: I took two months to evaluate them all, and Studio DV7 is unquestionably the best budget DV editing software you get buy.
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| trustmeonthis's Full Review: Pinnacle Systems Studio DV Firewire |
Studio DV7
This review is for Studio DV7 which is Pinnacle's Studio version 7 product coupled with a three-port Firewire (IEEE-1394) card. The latest patch level is 7.07.1.
Installation/Setup/Interface
The product sets up easily out of the box. The instructions were excellent especially concerning the sequential necessity of installing the Firewire card prior to software installation. The user interface is excellent and very intuitive. The video capture and editing process almost comes easily to you given the well thought out interface. In fact, the program's three major tabs are "Capture", "Edit", and "Make Movie", so it's very clear conceptually what follows what.
Special/Exclusive Features
One of the main features that swayed me here was their SmartCapture, or preview capture feature. Whereas most video editing packages use Full capture which requires many gigabytes of diskspace, Studio 7 only require megabytes of space when using SmartCapture. That's very nice from the perspectives of disk space and speed.
The Timeline feature is absolutely essential and not all budget DV packages have this feature. Their timeline feature permits maximum flexibility in matching scene transitions with accompanying music and narration to the video.
The Titling feature is integrated within Studio which is a great convenience. Other DV packages use an external titling program. There are many titling formats and options to utilize, as with the scene transitions. So you have alot of discretion in how to make your video look.
Stability Issues
Studio DV7 is a very complex piece of software. Consider you're dealing with a program that is capturing video from many types of camcorders, over a highspeed Firewire port, and writing it to disk as fast as possible. Then you're cutting video out, adding titles, adding transitions, music, narration and many other things. Then you're either output back to tape or to some Web format. And this is expected to work on a wide variety of PC platforms. As you can imagine many people have a difficult time getting all these to work correctly. I was no different. It took alot of trial and error for me to get past a certain problem but I did it.
Many people to quickly turn vicious on Pinnacle, Ulead, and Adobe - all with DV products. No product is perfect for so many different platforms. But for the most part, Studio is very stable. Its version level is 7.07.1 as of this writing and that's pretty far along. (Review Bottomline for closing remarks.)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 80 w/rebate
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Epinions.com ID:
trustmeonthis
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Location: Northern VA/Wash DC
Reviews written: 18
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