Pinnacle 8 - Has anybody had a positive experience with this

[Hojobey]

I want to buy Pinnacle 8. Their trial version is useless (no MPEG support). I am constantly hearing people bashing this product. Has anybody has success with this product in terms of 1) capturing, 2) editing 3) rendering 4) authoring. It gets rave reviews from magazines and horrible reviews from its users. Have the patches helped? Thanks.

[Two2Tango]

I can give a thumbs up for capturing with firewire. Menus are pretty much non existance. It will do VCD, SVCD, DVD's. TMPGenc for rendering is the best. It has templates for additional formats and is more versatile.

[donpedro]

I just finished my home movie DVD (all steps but burning) by using version 8.3.18.0. I like result.

[Hojobey]

How about the stability. If you are using TMPGenc to encode, and presumably another program to author, what is the benefit to this over Pinnacle 7. Have you tried rendering with it or authoring with it? Thanks.

[donpedro]

As I mentioned before... Yes... I am using Pinnacle 8 for all steps (capturing, editing, converting, DVD authoring+menu). Only burning I leave in Nero. Benefit of using Studio 8 is that you can use it from beginning to the end (even burning but I saw some issues with Sony so I use Nero).

Oooohh !!! Stability... It crashed only once during 2 day (2x16 hours work) editing and even that was when started clickin between option, tabs and settings faster then my eyes were able to see....

[Lula1]

Hi,

How about the motion menus that come with it ? Are they good quality ? What about their duration ( 10 secs ?)

[Feuerwehr]

It is a first class product for the price IF you it works for you. The Menus are pretty slick, nice graphics, motion menu templates, fancy fonts and such. Yes the Menu lengths can be changed. The mpeg2 encoder does not quite measure up to CCE or TEMPGenc, but does give quite acceptable results at the higher bitrates. Much better than the original Studio 7 encoder. The downside to S8 is that is very buggy on a lot of machines. You might want to visit the Pinnacle Studio 8 forum and browse around before you buy:
http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=1&SectionID=143&lng=1&Produ...DocTypesID=181

[aubrey_q]

I had it for a week but returned it (I know, it's software, but I found a way ).

Studio 8 IS NOT more stable than Studio 7. I bought it for it's DVD authoring features but found out DVD authoring works best if you let Studio do everything, from capture to editing to burning. When I brought over an MPEG-2 file that was encoded in TMPGEnc, Studio 8 would crash when I tried the burning process. It never really got to burn; it crashed during the "Disc compilation" process.

There is also another issue how it handles the quality of the video when it burns. Studio will try to burn your DVD at the highest quality if you tell it in the settings, but that's only about 55 minutes. At first I considered that a bug but if you buy DVD+R dics that are in a jewel case, they'll say the disc will give you 2 hours of video but close to 1 hour of "HIGH QUALITY" video. If you leave Studio's DVD settings in Automatic mode, it'll tell you at what quality the video will be burned, for example 68%.

I took an MPEG-2 file that Studio was going to burn at 68% video quality and used DVD Movie Factory. DMF didn't create a menu because it was a single clip, but it burned what I threw at it. I don't know if DMF secretly adjusts quality during burning, but the video looked excellent.

I like to create slideshows with Studio 7 because of the transitions. With Studio 7, I could randomly or sequentially select a group of photos and drop them in the timeline. Studio 8 will only let me select one or all the photos in the folder. When you have over 200 pictures, well, you see...

So, bottom line, Studio 8 is a good product if you'll be using it for your entire creation. I liked how it would automatically set chapter points in your video. However, the stuff I mentioned above made me give it a pass for now, even though I could've gotten it for $20 after mail-in rebate.

[banjazzer]

I found it excellent at importing DV uncompressed from my camcorder via firewire card (no dropped frames). It is extremely easy to use, and generally stable on my setup. The editing and transition effects whilst not up to Adobe Premiere standards far exceed anything I am likely to want to do.

The one limitation I noticed is that you can get better results encoding to SVCD if you use an external program, like TMPG or CCE. However, if I recall correctly (it's a while since I used it) after editing there did not appear to be an option to save the edit to HD without compression. What I did was to export the edited DV back to the camcorder and then import again to encode with TMPG.

Obviously this does seem a bit daft, and you also need a camcorder with DV-in.

[donpedro]

You cab save it as DV AVI (same format as your captured files) and re-encode that one. No need to capture back to tape and PC again.

[igalan]

For me Studio 8 doesn't work It fails to compile almost every project, crashes during render, audio drops... I tried all the versions (and betas) but no luck. Too bad because it could be one of the best video editing programs for home users...

[Russo238]

Initially, I ran into some capturing issues with Studio 8 (frames were being dropped every half-second, I kid you not). That is until I visited Pinnacle's message board and found that Windows 98 SE & Windows ME DID NOT automatically enable the DMA feature of my hard drive.

Once I enabled the hard drive's DMA, capturing w/ Studio 8 was great. Not a single dropped frame.

Since then, Studio 8 is what I use on just about all of my projects (home movies, documentaries, videos, etc). I rarely will use Premiere as Studio could do most of what I need in 1/5th the time.