Pro results for about $250
Written: Jan 22 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Adobe Premiere 6.0 alone is worth the purchase price!
Cons: Wish they had included an MPEG-2 encoder. No upgrade path.
The Bottom Line: Buy this to get Premiere, the Pinnacle "extras" are nice, but pale in comparison. Choose carefully if you think you might want to author DVDs in the future.
|
|
|
| jprestondavid's Full Review: Pinnacle Systems DV200 w/ Adobe Premier V 6.0 |
About a year ago, I bought a JVC GR-DVL307 DV camcorder on one of the auction sites. I was stunned by the quality of the video, and by the things that this camera could do. I started doing a little research and found one of the entry-level DV editors bundled with a firewire card for about $60. I bought it - thus began my journey down this expensive road to DVD authoring...
I quickly grew beyond the capabilities of the entry-level editing package. After doing some research, I found that Adobe Premiere appeared as the medium-high level standard for DV editing. I really did not want to drop $549 for it. When I ran across the Pinnacle DV200 package that included Premiere 6.0 for about $250, I figured it must be an LE version, or crippled in some way. After more research, I found that it was a fully licensed version, and I pulled the trigger on the purchase.
WOW! What a package. Bravo Adobe and Pinnacle!! Pinnacle insists that you load Premiere as indicated in the Adobe literature, then load the Pinnacle extras. I left the card from the entry-level package installed (probably out of laziness, more than anything else), just to see if it would play. It did, so I ran it that way for several weeks (until I decided to sell the entry level package to a friend. At that point, I put the Pinnacle card in, nothing skipped a beat).
To my joy, it really is bundled with a full version of Premiere V6.0. I feel like the software police are going to come to my house anytime now, because this is the closest that I have ever come to stealing software.
No doubt about it, be ready to spend several days getting familiar with Premiere. It is a very powerful package, and with power comes a learning curve. I have been using it for 6 to 7 months now, and I am still learning new things. There are tons of web-reviews for Premiere, so I am not going to go into minute detail about that program. The things that Pinnacle adds to the package are:
Hollywood FX Copper: These are a bunch of automated scene transition effects, they are very configurable, and very 3D. These are better (IMHO) than the stock transition effects that come with Premiere, but they use a different dialog that makes you say *no* to an *upgrade now* question before they let you in to the transition editor. A minor flaw, but worth mentioning.
Pinnacle TitleDeko: I am sure that I have not tapped the huge potential of this title generator. What I have used has been awesome. I have designed several title effects that I was doubtful could be done.
Alpha Magic: Have not used it yet.
Adobe Photoshop LE: LE, need I say more. I know that Photoshop is one of the best, but I have a *real* edition of a competitive product that can do much more than the LE version of Photoshop. I think that this is one of those cases where they are giving you a crippled version of a product in order to get you hooked into buying the standard version, in this case the standard version is very expensive ($609).
SmartSound QuickTracks: Have not used it yet.
Total Training Introduction to Premiere 6.0: Just to give you an idea of how deep Premiere is, this training CD took me over an hour to go through (and I found it very valuable). It is a DEMO version of the REAL training package available from a 3rd party. The REAL training package takes about 10 hours to go through (I did not buy it...yet).
Ok, now that I have produced some cool home videos, I am ready to go to the next level. I want to play my movies on my home theater DVD player. I started making SVCD (Super Video CD) discs that played just fine in the DVD player, but I was not impressed with the video quality. BTW, creation of SVCDs required the use of an MPEG-2 encoder, a piece that did not come with the DV200 package.
So now I have decided to (try to) produce DVDs. This has been a real learning process. I bought a DVD-R drive, it came with DVD authoring software, but it leaves much to be desired (for instance, it cannot handle source AVI files larger than 2GB in size, which is only about 4 minutes of DV). So now I find that I need to buy a real MPEG-2 encoder that can handle DVD quality. There are a couple of freeware programs out there that can do it, but as is usually the case, you get what you pay for. Pinnacle sells a PCI card that does hardware MPEG-2 encoding, and Premiere will let you edit the output stream from that card. This looks like the hot setup (could be a real timesaver). The problem is that to get the Pinnacle card (DC1000 or DVD1000), you have to buy an entire package that includes all of the stuff in the DC200. I would love to buy their card, but I am not springing for Premiere and all of this software AGAIN!!
Ok, I am off my soap-box now...
Premiere is awesome, but I must admit that I have had an occasional lock-up and an occasional GPF. Save your project frequently!! Also, the Pinnacle plug-in for Premiere wants to see the camera connected when you boot up Premiere. It generates an error message but is otherwise harmless.
BTW, I am running this on a homebuilt 1200MHz Athlon PC running W98SE, with a 40GB 7200RPM ATA100 HD. It does not drop any frames during capture. Dropped frames are a common hurdle during DV capture.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $256
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
jprestondavid
|
|
Location: Central IN, USA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 2 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.