Studio 9 junk?

[DVD-Dummy]

I bought a Studio 9 av/dv card and software to put my vhs tapes on dvd with my pc.

Just to try it out I put 45 minutes of video in the pc and then edited it and hit the button to encode it and burn it and it took 5 hours!!!!!!
About 5 minutes of that was for burning!

Then to top it off the audio was not on there because the wrong button was selected for input source. My fault on that one for not checking!!

Am I doing something wrong with the software or is it junk?

Any tutorials for it if it's me??
Better choice for software it that's the problem??


New to me so I could use some help.
Very quick learner!!

[thecoalman]

Just to try it out I put 45 minutes of video in the pc and then edited it and hit the button to encode it and burn it and it took 5 hours!!!!!!
About 5 minutes of that was for burning!

Not sure what the average encode time is for your system but that's entirely possible. For example a p4 2.4 takes over 2 hours average to encode. If you want to try a different app give Video Studio 8 a try, you'll get better results anyhow. Look in the specs on their website to see if it supports your card.

BTW I think I can fairly state Pinnacle products are considered crap by most people around here.

[monkeyking]

I have a Pentium 3.0 with hyperthreading and it probably takes about 2-3 hours to process 45 minutes of video with Studio 9 plus. It would prolly take 7 hours on my 1.5Ghz machine. I kick off the heavy duty processing at night and go to bed.

IMHO, not junk. I like the program.

[DVD-Dummy]

I guess I should probably start it before bed since I only get about 5 hours anyway!!!

I like the program but I hate that they want more money to make most of the accessories in the program functional.

I'll check out a few others and see what I come up with.

Thanks!

[thecoalman]

I have a Pentium 3.0 with hyperthreading and it probably takes about 2-3 hours to process 45 minutes of video with Studio 9 plus. .

Interesting as I have a P4 3.0 and 45 minutes takes 45 minutes for the basic type of settings you would have in Studio 9. What exactly are the settings and your other system specs? Are you applying any filters or changing the brightness or just a straight conversion? Are you just referring to the AVI to MPG or the entire process?

I like the program but I hate that they want more money to make most of the accessories in the program functional.

That's common practice for a lot of software that comes preinstalled on machines or comes with hardware. It's like a version between the trial one and the full fledged one usually with some ambiguous name such as "special edition". The exception for this is usually some of the higher end hardware such as the Matrox and Canopus cards that come with Adobe Premier but it should be the full version for what you are paying for those cards.

[northcat_8]

I haven't used Studio 9 but I have Pinnacle Studio 8 Deluxe and that's common.

For whatever reason it takes Pinnacle forever to encode video. Now if I input DV-AVI and output DV-AVI the time is still longer than I think it should be, but it's not too bad. BUT if I use Studio 8 to convert it to DVD compliant MPEG-2 it takes for freakin ever to encode it.

You need to find a nice little program called "TMPGenc Plus" make sure you get the MPEG-2 plugin and use it to convert. You can take the .m2v & .wav outputs back into Studio 8, so I'm sure you can take them back into Studio 9, but I don't, I just use TMPGenc DVD Author rather than the Pinnacle product to author the DVD.

Pinnacle's Studio products are great in theory, but they seem to be very picky as to which systems they like and I've never gotten my Studio 8 to author a DVD. I haven't tried it in about 2 years but it just wasn't worth the hassle.

and if I had another software that would use the Pinnacle card to capture <adobe Premiere> I wouldn't use Studio 8 at all.

[DVD-Dummy]

I was just capturing the video, adding a few transitions, cutting a few clips and buring it to dvd.

Now when I captured it it put a "scene" about every 2-4 seconds so there was over 400 clips.
Later I found that you can set it to do it when you want and not when it wants to.

Will all those clips slow it down too?

I'm going to look into other programs this weekend when I have time.

[monkeyking]

Interesting as I have a P4 3.0 and 45 minutes takes 45 minutes for the basic type of settings you would have in Studio 9. What exactly are the settings and your other system specs? Are you applying any filters or changing the brightness or just a straight conversion? Are you just referring to the AVI to MPG or the entire process?

.

The last project was 56 minutes. It included 70 still pics, with a few animated pans, some AVI from my digital camera, and five WAV files tossed in for background music. I didn't time it originally. To get a number for my post, I restarted a render to MPEG files and the slider bar was about half done at 90 minutes so I said 2-3 hours. Maybe it's not linear.




.

[lordsmurf]

Junk, yes.

[Dr. DOS]

Feed Studio compliant MPEG's instead of AVI's and when you go to encode choose the same bit rate as the fed file. I just finished a short thirty minute snippet and it took about 10 minutes (it only encodes the titles and transitions)...

I create my compliant MPEG's with MainConcepts MPEG Encoder (captures and converts DV to MPEG on the fly)
https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=Mainconcept_MPEG_Encoder

[n3vino]

I have a p4, 1.5 , 512 ram. It took about 9 hours to encode 45 minutes of video using tmpence plus. But I set it to 8000 bit rate and the slow search for high quality. I got a good quality DVD. I would think that a faster system would have taken less time to encode.

I could have encoded faster had I set it to a lower bitrate and a faster search speed but I would think that a faster speed would not produce a good quality DVD. But in all fairness, I have not tested tmpgence plus at a faster rate.

I had used two other encoders that were much faster but the DVD quality was really bad. They were my video editing software (mainactor) and I used Roxio Easy Creator 6. But I have not used studio 9.

[pepegot1]

Try Ulead VideoStudio 8. It is more reliable and faster. I did an hour video with stills,audio, transitions, titles and long video clips in less than one hour.

[frank1701]

Another option of software that uses the Pinnacle hardware would be
Scenalyzer, available here:
http://www.scenalyzer.com/
It's cheap! ($30) and unlike Pinnacle software, your VHS captures will stay in sync. The only Pinnacle software that is worth using is an old version of Express/Expression. Very streamlined, but gets the job done