For those of you thinking about purchasing a Pinnacle product you might be interested in my personal experiences with the customer service levels recently:

Pinnacle have recently announced a new product called Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5. This replaces two previous products Edition 5 and Liquid Purple. The Liquid Edition 5.5 sounds like a very good product but Pinnacle have made a complete pig's ear of the release, upgrade information, and shipment of the new product. Those of us with Edition 5 have been kept in the dark (especially in Europe), the product was promised to ship on the 22nd September but all our orders show as out of stock with no date as to when they will be shipped.

All emails to Pinnacle go unanswered, all questions submitted through their eStore (the online shopping tool) get deleted (obviously they don't want prospective buyers seeing the problems), and all threads and posts in the forums detailing the problems being experienced, or referencing deleted emails and questions, are also being systematically deleted! One example was with a thread in which some posters claimed Pinnacle as being a "good company". Others quoted their experiences with regard to the poor level of customer service they are receiving regarding the upgrade saga, and the apparent censorship being employed. Oddly enough, Pinnacle deleted the bad comments, left the good comments in tact and then added their reply to the end of the thread!

So, what am I saying. Well in summary, the Pinnacle Editing software is very good, feature rich and worth the money. However, the company have no concept of, nor do they care about Customer Service.

You decide whether that should influence any buying decision. Would I buy from them again? Nope! It's Vegas and Adobe for me next time (in fact I am researching the competitive upgrade path now).

I'm hearing ya Lloyd, I had the same type of problem when I tried to upgrade my DV500 to Edition Pro. I'm totally over Pinnacle's service and support. My next NLE system will either be AVID or FCP on a Mac.

Pinnacle has been like that since I purchased their Pinnacle Studio 400 about 6 years ago. I had to take it in to them to prove it did not work. Still the Directors of hardware and software insisted that it worked OK.

They and FAST are the direct reason I've been a Canopus user for the past 5 years.

Canopus is not perfect but their products work very well and with nearly complete reliability. I'll only replace my DVRexRT when I need to upgrade computers and the 5 volt PCI slots have disappeared from the latest motherboards.

Still, I will have had about 6-7 years use out of the hardware which is much better than most editing systems.

Hi Lloyd,

I have a friend who tried calling there technical helpline, and got no where. This service they charge for by the minute, and costs a bomb. All though I have a pinnacle DV500 card my self I am thinking of taking up an offer from Matrox, where I can trade in my card for their RTx 100 Xtreme.

All the best,

Ed

Used Pinnacle Studio 8 for a short while, then upgraded to Edition 5. Lately when the announcement about Liquid Edition upgrade was out, I went to their site purchase an upgrade.

I got an e-mail saying that the software had been shipped although the announcement stated that the first shipment would take place on Sept. 23. (I made the purchase on the 16th) 2 or three days after, I was notified that they shipped the wrong software and that I could keep it and the upgrade would be shipped on Sept. 26. Three days ago, I e-mailed them saying that I haven't received the wrong software and complained that they already charged my card even though they haven't shipped the correct software. I got a response saying that I should receive the wrong software very shortly, and the Liquid Edition upgrade will start shipping on September 29.

Now you tell me how frustrating this has been.

I didn't for one minute think I was alone :)

Ed,
I've been looking at the Matrox RT.100 Xtreme competitive upgrade. Problem is it doesn't seem to cater for those of us who have Edition 5.1 (i.e. not the Pro which comes with the card).

Hi Lloyd,

That is indeed true.

Nice to see another Brit on the board.

Ed

I went through the same. Didn't even know there was a 5.5 except for visiting their site. Ordered the upgrade and got an email saying it had shipped the next day then got one the day after saying they shipped the wrong product but that I could keep it. Still haven't got it but my status shows that 5.5 shipped today.