Cons: VERY unstable. Lot of voice out-of-sync issues. Numerous patches yield steady supply of new problems.
The Bottom Line: Really easy to use when it works, but need to be a tech person to work through the inevitable problems. This is not ready for the average consumer!
jethrog35's Full Review: Pinnacle Studio 9 Full Version for PC (210100341)
Last Christmas I treated myself to a new DV camcorder which came with a light version of Studio 9, called 'Studio 9 SE'. I eagerly installed the software, looking forward to surprising the family with a DVD of our Christmas celebrations.
My first impression was that the product was quite intuitive to use, with a well thought-out user interface. Capturing and editing the video seemed to proceed quite smoothly.
One annoyance was the fact that the SE version of Studio 9 comes with only basic functionality, enough to capture video, move some scenes around, and burn a DVD. Everything else is extra. Knowing that I wanted to do more than the basics (add a bit of "wow" to the production), I paid the extra $60 to upgrade to the Plus version.
The Plus version gives one just about all you need to make a decent video with some cute effects. There are still a lot of "a la carte" effects that are not enabled, but I can live with that. If you are a real videophile, then this product will "a la carte" you to death. The real cost of the product is actually rather hidden this way.
When the product works, it's a real treat. It's easy and intuitive to add video scenes, move them around, add overlay effects (such as text on top of the video), add voice-over sound, music tracks, etc. I've only referenced the help system twice since purchasing the product, there has simply been no need for it.
This is where the fun ends, the major issue being "when does the product work?"
Studio 9, like its predecessors, has been plagued with stability issues. Random crashes and hangs are the norm, not the exception. Pinnacle tries to blame everything on outdated hardware drivers, but this is often not the case. To their credit, the product has been designed to handle crashes and hangs quite well, where it's very good at saving its state, effectively anticipating a crash.
The fun really begins when you've finished your editing and you wish to render the video to DVD. Rendering might just as well be a four-letter word. When it works, it takes a LONG time. My last 90-minute video took almost 4 hours to render to the hard drive, so this does not include DVD burning time. It gets particularly frustrating when the project has been rendering for 3 hours and then the program hangs, which happens often. I strongly suggest that if you insist on using this product, make your video in segments of no longer than 20 minutes. Render each segment to its own AVI file on your hard drive. Then create a new project that compiles all your AVI files into one video. You then stand a much better chance of rendering your video to DVD.
My first video was rendered to DVD (after much grief) only to realize that halfway through the video the lips of people were out of sync with the audio. This problem had to do with capturing my video to an mpeg file rather than to an AVI file. A lot of users have reported numerous cases of OOS (Out-Of-Sync) with their videos for a variety of reasons.
The latest version of Studio 9 (as of the writing of this review) is version 9.4.3. After reviewing Pinnacle's own web boards (and from personal experience), you are best to stay with version 9.3.5. After that release, Pinnacle has been breaking almost as much as they've fixed.
Keep in mind that when applying a patch from Pinnacle, make sure that you install the "full" version, not the "lite" version of the patch. The full version will replace all the software, which will cover you if you started with the 'SE' version of the software.
Starting with version 9.4.2, Pinnacle added a feature allowing you to capture video from a non-copy protected DVD so that you can edit the content as you wish. This was a compelling feature as we had all of our old family movies professionally transferred from old 8mm film to DVD, but I wanted to add voiceover commentary and background music to the otherwise silent movies.
The video imported fine, but version 9.4.2 was quite unstable (hanging every 5 or so edit operations), so I eagerly upgraded to 9.4.3 when it became available. Unfortunately 9.4.3 had playback problems and the video is not playable at all with the more stable 9.3.5 version. Thus I'm stuck with 9.4.2 with no where to go at this time. This is the highly-abbreviated description of an issue that I dragged through tech support for weeks.
Tech support by email is quite responsive, often giving you a response within a day. This is quite refreshing since most companies appear to ignore emails requesting tech support. Telephone support is quite brief, where they just want to get you off of the phone so that they can keep up with the deluge of other calls. Before you call or write, make sure that you've installed all the latest drivers for all pieces of your hardware (video card, audio card, motherboard, BIOS, etc.) or else tech support will only ask you to call them back once you've done that. In my case, they still tried to tell me that my drivers were out of date. This seems to be their pet response.
I'm sure that Pinnacle performs quite a number of tests on their products before they are released. There is a growing consensus on the web boards, however, that full system testing is largely left to the consumer. This becomes rather obvious when you see the nature of glaring problems that consumers report. As a software developer myself, I know the symptoms of what we call "spaghetti code". This is the kind of programming that is the result of having too many hands in the pot over the years without enough quality controls in place. Programmers develop their own tools, which are often duplicates of someone else's undocumented tools, and one tool works while the other has a bug. The net result is a piece of software that simply can't be fixed, regardless of the effort.
Would I recommend this product? Absolutely not. I would like to qualify that with "if they get it fixed then it's the best out there", but after going through numerous patches myself and reading the web board posts from long-time sufferers going back to Studio 7 and 8, this product will not likely EVER be fixed. One can only pray...
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