Pinnacle Studio 7 quality?

[Rise]

Has anybody used Pinnacle Studio 7 and it's MPEG-1/2 encoding? How's the quality compared to TMPGEnc, LSX or other encoding tools?

[bertmartin]

Forget about quality with Pinnacle Studio 7 encoders. It doesn't compare with other encoders you mentioned. I have Studio 7 and cannot get it to work on my system. Many others have the same problems as reported on their forum. The main problem is with rendering to get the project out of Studio 7 so you can use an external encoder. Rendering stops after a few minutes and completely locks my computer. I have tried all their workarounds with no luck. It has a good editor and I am waiting for a new release.

Again the built-in encoder is no good.

[Rise]

Thanks!
I thought that this can be the case. I will not waste my time and money to upgrade to Studio 7 from my 1.06.

[alkieman]

Studio 7 is great as an editing package but the MPEG2 output sucks. It is not DVD compliant (wrong field order) so although the MPEG2 files will play happily on oyur PC, if you burn them to DVD you get horrible stuttering. Pinnacle are aware of the problem but haven't done anything to resolve it.

The actual quality of output is quite good with the bitrate whacked up so if the files were DVD compliant the quality would probably be perfectly good for most people.

For the highest quality though, stick with outputting to an AVI file and encoding with TMPGEnc or another software encoder.