Going to buy Studio Deluxe and 40GB HDD, talk me out of it?

[CMP1223]

I plan on converting my Hi8 tape to DV AVI, editing it, and making a VHS and a VCD. I planning on buying the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe (http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage.asp?Product_ID=520&Langue_ID=7) and this hard drive for storage (http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10260764&hdwt=30401&loc=101) I have a 750Mgz PIII w/ 256MB SDRAM and a 32MB Nvidia Card with Windoes XP. Does this sound like a good system for my analog (Hi8) capture? Should I stay away from Pinnacle products? What about the Studio Deluxe?

Thanks!

Chris

[CMP1223]

Anybody have experience with the Studio Deluxe and a setup like this?

Thanks-

CMP

[Feuerwehr]

Chris,
Everyone has different standards, and biases, so I would not try to encourage or discourage you from purchasing Pinnacle Studio Deluxe. However, I will give you my own personal observations for what they worth.

Good points:
1. An integrated package like Studio Deluxe is easy and simple to work with.
2. The Studio 7 portion of the package is really great to work with. I have tried about all of the editing software out there in the same price range and have not found anything as good. Studio 7 has a wealth of great features, and is very easy to work with.
Bad points:
1. The mpg encoders that Pinnacle employs are not the best. A VCD or SVCD produced by Pinnacle Express does not compare in quality to one encoded by CCE or TmpGenc.
2. There are (or at least were) a lot of complaints about Pinnacle software hang-ups with some systems. (I have had Pinnacle 7 and Pinnacle Express since they were released and never ever personally experienced any glitches on my system.)

I run ME, a P4 with 256mb of rdram, an Nvidia GeForce2 64 ultra, and a 40GB drive partition dedicated to video. My system is not the same as yours, but I would think that you certainly have enough horsepower with your present system as long as your hard drive is fast enough. I have a Dv camcorder so I do not do analog capture.
The bottom line is that the Studio Deluxe package should probably work fine for you if you are not too picky with the final quality. I personally do not use Express any more. I take the edited Studio 7 AVI file and use TmpGEnc to encode, and burn with NERO. It is slower process, but is really not that complicated.
If you prefer simplicity, you could just purchase Studio 7, and use Ulead’s Movie Factory instead of Pinnacle Express. Although Ulead encoding is inferior to CCE or TmpGEnc, it is somewhat better than Express. You could also get the whole Ulead package instead of going the Pinnacle route, although I do prefer Studio 7 to Ulead’s MovieStudio 6 as an editing package.
Good luck!
Jim

[TechJunkie]

Just bought Pinnacle Studio 7 for its feature/function and excellent reviews. The only problem I have so far is that when rendering an hour long .avi file, the video and sound will creep out of synch by about .5 seconds at the end of the hour.

I don't know what to do about it since I thought I had a system optimized for editing: fast processor/mobo with 3 7200RPM drives on three channels. One disk for the system, one for reading the source material and one to write the finished output. All drives were defragged and all non-essential tasks were shut down.

Other than that, I like Studio 7. 8)