I LOVE this product, but HATE that it often corrupts work which you have invested many hours in. Others, like aashok seem to agree wholeheartedly. There are few things more frustrating than spending 3 hours laying out an awesome dvd with great scene divisions, special effects, cool transitions, nice credits, menus, and titles, only to have it produce a dvd where the audio is horribly out of sync with the video. I have corresponded with technical folks after being very vocal on their forums and they confirm that there are quality problems which they need to address.

This is a product which would rule the whole prosumer video editing and DVD authoring market if they could make it reliable. I want it to succeed and keep trying new betas and versions only to find that some fatal flaw makes me run back to other products like TMPGENC, DVD Complete, or MyDVD.


FEATURES

Capure - works great with my Sony TRV25 MiniDV camera.

Editing - Allows nice scene splitting and management. Allows frame by frame editing with good keystroke assignments to allow you to get the job done quickly. They have great overlay title samples and capabilities. There are a number of very cool 3-D scene transitions guaranteed to wow your audience. Nice slideshow capability from digital stills. Nice audio support with several tracks which you can fade in and out with very precise control - the main audio from the video capture, a music track, and a voice track. It will rip from your music CDs.

Authoring - They have great dvd menus with sharp graphics and nice motion menus. Built in editor so you can change it to suit your needs. You can title each chapter with an intuitive interface.

Make Disc - Allows you to create VCD's, DVDs, RealAudio (to put on your website - see http://www.thepeters.org/uhaul.htm for some news footage I put online), Windows media, and various other formats. For DVDs, it will allow you to conserve space by using mpeg audio encoding.

My Computer
When I tried in December of 2002 to use a 450 MHz machine, it would take 24 hours to do the most basic encoding. Newer processors have MMX and faster CPUs and buses. I bought a new machine mainly so I could edit video: An HP 753N, which came with Pentium 4, 2.53GHz, 80GB HDD, ultradma with DMA enabled; all HDDs both have very good xfer rates 40-55Mbps. 3 1394 firewire ports 6 USB2.0 ports

I added: 120GB Maxtor 7200 RPM ultradma HDD (with dma enabled), 80GB firewire drive, Sony firewire DVD writer DRX500UL

EASE OF USE

I have tried 7 other programs and this one has the best user interface of them all.

RELIABILITY
This program is very unreliable. To be fair, many of the others are unreliable. This market is currently in a "feature race" and everyone seems to think that feature bullets on the side of the box will equate to market share. Read usenet and the user forums and you will see that there are many dissatisfied users out there.

CUSTOMER SERVICE
You can try to report a bug, but all I ever got was an over-generalized response. The most frustrating thing was that even if their bug remained unfixed, their automated system would send you an email stating that your problem was "resolved". I could see where they might want to say that it was "closed", but when they have a bug, "resolved" is a big, fat lie and an insult to users who continue to experience the problem.

It wasn't until I became vocal on usenet forums (not their product forums) that I was contacted by their quality team lead where he acknowledged that the knew about the bugs I was reporting.

THINGS I WOULD CHANGE
Make It Work!! - Fix the bugs. In July, there were still 15 major outstanding bugs documented on the most recent beta (http://www.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/S8_betaDownload_f6.html)

Variable Bitrate Encoding - this would allow you to get 2 or more hours with the same quality on one dvd.

Allow larger mpeg imports - so I can overcome the VBR limitation by encoding with another program.

Reverse - It is really cool to make people jump "out" of the pool or go "up" the slide.

Better Debugging - So users can report problems and Pinnacle can fix them.

Fix analog import - If you pull video from old vhs or some other source where the sound is poor, it captures out of sync.

THINGS DONE BETTER IN OTHER PRODUCTS

They work more reliably.

RANDOM COMMENTS

Like an abusive relationship, you want to love this program and keep going back to it to see if it has improved.

OTHER PROGRAMS TRIED
I typically use TMPGENC and DVD Complete when I don't want to invest the time extensively editing the footage. TMPGENC is a very good MPEG encode with a variety of options, though users need to be more technical than most. DVD Complete is a reasonable editing environment, but is not as sophisticated as Studio. DVD Complete will import pre-mpeg-encoded tracks very well, so I use it for most of my DVDs.

I used Sonic's MyDVD for a couple of projects, but when it trashed a couple with very poor encoding (lots of strobing) and some out of sync audio, I stopped using it.

Other product comparisons are in my product review table at http://www.thepeters.org/dvd_product_table.htm

DVD Weblog: Friday, June 20, 2003
Created 1.6 hour home movie dvd
Started a project for all of the May family footage a while back on a prior Studio beta. Had to abandon it after audio out of sync problems and due to being too busy several weeks ago.

Picked it back up and generated an AVI with Studio, used TMPGENC to encode at a little under 6KMbps video, 128Kbps mpeg audio, and created DVD file with DVD Complete. Looked pretty good when I got done. A little fuzziness in some areas (faces) during complex images (like rose bushes in background) that I haven't noticed at higher video bitrates. I bet the studios have equipment that permits them to tell the encoders to better encode the faces or whatever focus of viewer attention the producer deems appropriate. I told TMPGENC's wizard to adjust the video VBR so that it would consume 99% of the DVD-R.

When I got done creating the VIDEO_TS dir with DVD Complete, I had 300M left to put digital still images. I used RecordNow to create a DVD with my still image archive (raw image files). Unlike my previous production, I did not put the stills in the DVD video footage since I didn't want to degrade the overall video quality.

I guess Studio is out until they fix known mpeg audio OOS problems. I would love it if it would work. At least it can create AVIs and does not crash as much as it used too.


DVD Weblog: Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Created 2 home movie DVDs (Studio bites)
Created two DVD's over the last few days. Spent several hours with the Pinnacle Studio (8.7.23 beta) importing and reviewing footage as well as creating a sitcom-like intro clip with "Starring..." titles. When I burned the DVD, I found that Studio had botched the audio sync. Luckily I was able to recover the work by having Studio output an AVI, which I subsequently encoded with TMPGENC and created the DVD with DVD Complete. Studio has great titling, audio management, scene transitions, etc., but is it too much to ask to actually create a dvd with the audio in sync? What is the point if it cannot do that? Studio needs a reverse feature in addition to its slow motion and fast motion capabilities. I made one clip where we slid "up" a big blow-up slide by running the video camera backward while capturing, but it had many artifacts in it.

For the second DVD, I used microsoft windows movie maker to create the AVI. I really like MWMM.

I might have squeezed both onto one dvd, particularly since I ended up using TMPGENC anyway. But, I was concerned at a possible lack of quality for permanent storage of these home movies if I had the average bitrate at half the max (4mbps). I don't mind 6Mbps, but anything lower for permanent storage is below my comfort zone since I reuse my tapes.

I had room left to archive the originals of the 300 digital still pictures on one of the DVDs. I also put all the stills in the dvd content for ease of viewing by non-techies.

Latest cheapest 4X DVD-R with white labels - 50 pack at Americal for $72 (including ground shipping). esbuy.com lost at $88 (with ground shipping).

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Here's A Way That We Can Reduce identity Theft


Recommended:
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