Pinnacle Studio Deluxe 7 or 8 ??

[ATTT]

Hello All,

I am in the process of looking for a good video capture card and the ones I am looking at for the time being is a Pinnacle Studio Deluxe package. It seems that I have a choice of version 7 (the old style box) and Version 8 (the new box with a good lookin' chick on the front cover).

What I wanted to know is wether there is any difference in hardware between the two? or is it just an update or the software bundled?
I could not check the two cause if I want version 8 then I will need to have it ordered.

The requirements I have is below:
-> able to capture analogue video through S-Video or Composite (if it can also do DV as well that would be a bonus)
-> Want to be able to also capture at DVD res? (720x???)
-> PAL and NTSC
-> Ease of installation and use of the card.
-> Save a much $$$ as possible..

If someone can give advise as to wether this will match my requirements? Or recommendations?

My current system config is as follows:
Athlon 1600+XP
512 DDR ram
MSI K7V266Pro-RU
3x IBM 7200 drives (30G, 60G and 80G)
Sound Blaster Audigy
Asus V8200T2 Deluxe (The video in port is horrible to use and it
is really stressing me. I still cannot successfully capture video at an on res and with audio :cry on XP or 2K. Hence looking at an easier solution)

Thanks.

[brergo]

I am looking into Studio Deluxe myself and asked Pinnacle that exact question about the differences between version 7 and 8. They said the hardware is exactly the same, but the software has been upgraded. I'm pretty sure it will do everything you need to.

Brian

[bruce48]

FYI,Here is a link to the S7 forums:

http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=1&SectionID=58&lng=1

[EricB]

I'm sure there are a lot of satisfied Studio7 & Studio8 users out there, but if I could return my copy of Studio8 for a refund, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Studio8 has got a lot of great new features and includes TitleDeko titling and HollywoodFx if you get the upgraded version. These are very nice and produce remarkable results.

HOWEVER, despite reports to the contrary, Studio8 mpeg encoder is still not very good. I bought the package to take advantage of the new authoring features. You must use their encoder to use their authoring.

On VCD this means only standard bitrate of 1150 and with a marginal encoder this looks poor. With SVCD and DVD even at high bitrates there are a lot of artifacts around anything that moves.

Even weirder, after trying it on two very different systems, it seems like it won't write properly to CD-RW. They skip, crackle, and in two cases could not be erased afterward. The same files using Studio8 would burn to CD-R with no problem. The result would play properly on a standalone player.

I have a Lacie firewire DVD drive. Software not only won't recognize it, it locks up and crashes the system. Overall, the entire package is much slower than previous versions. So much for authoring DVDs!

I would still recommend ULEAD VideoStudio6 and DVD MovieFactory. These are much more versatile, handle various file formats with ease, and have a far superior encoder. Not as dead simple to a beginner as Studio8, but in my opinion still a better system.

[bruce48]

I am a newbie at all this but I like S7 for its ease of capture, editing and final output to tape, mpg, avi etc. Really easy and simple.
To make SVCD I output on S7 to AVI and then I use TMPGenc and that program's SVCD template to make my SVCD file to be burned on Nero.
It would be nice to be able to stay within one program to go from A to Z but this recipe produces outstanding looking SVCDs.
Poking around the S8 forums on the pinnacle site and reading what you say about S8 convinced me to stay with what I have.

[EricB]

Sure, again my biggest disappointment was that I wanted to use the new authoring features which are really cool, but you can't import files and not have them be re-encoded.

I am at a loss as to why one of the majors (ULEAD, Pinnacle, Adobe, etc) doesn't just license TMPGEnc and use it. Pinnacle especially would benefit from this setup. ULEAD's endoder gets better and better, and Adobe has always relied on plugins (ie. give me some more money!).