Studio 8 disappointment

[Mark Irvine]

I recently purchased a PAL version of Pinnacle Studio 8 with bundled firewire card. Capture to my hard drive appeared to work well, however the .avi image was badly distorted. Any movement on screen appeared serrated, as if the non interlaced frames had pulled apart. This was still apparent when the file was rendered. It was not apparent if the file was rendered as .mpg but the .mpg frame rate was jerky. Output back to Digital8 tape did not work at all. I was testing the process with a small 3 minute file so it was not as if I was taxing the system. My computer is well in excess of Studio 8’s requirements and I had closed all non essential applications. After several weeks of wasted fiddling I returned the product for a refund. Can anyone suggest a good reliable NLE system/configuration for home use?

[Gints Klimanis]

The zippering you described was my experience with Studio on a 700 MHz Pentium III machine, but I have no such problems on a slightly faster 1.3 GHZ Athlon machine. Also, you may have some issues in Windows playback if other MPEG2 or DV decoders are installed. Anyway, I've made about 20 DVDs from DV footage captured using my Pinnacle Firewire card and am pleased with the results.

[Mark Irvine]

These are the specs for my computer -
Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-7VTXE, VIA Chipset
Processor: AMD Athlon XP1600+ (speed is in the range of 1.4 GHz I think)
RAM : 512 MB DDR PC2100
Graphics: GForce2MX 64MByte
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 40GB 7200rpm (I think that throughput is about 5 megabit/sec

Have you had any problems ouputting back to digital tape through a camcorder?

[Gints Klimanis]

Hi,

I've never output the result back to digital tape. Sorry.
Studio8 works very well for me, although I have moved on to Vegas Video for better audio and video processing. If you do
go for Studio8, I highly recommend using revision 8.5.21 and nothing later. The earlier versions had many DVD creation problems. All revisions after 8.5.21 (well, I only tested the betas)
had audio/video sync issues.

Your computer is fast enough and is quite similar to mine.

[Trond Saetre]

I have done output to tape using the Pinnacle Studio 8 a few times. The only problem was that one time, the last two seconds was missing. (both video and audio)

I use the latest update (8.10.xx) and I have not experienced any of the audio/video sync problems others have reported.
Maybe I have been just lucky?
Some of my friends have had some problems regardless of which revision of Studio 8 they use.

[Glenn Chan]

The VIA motherboard chipset might be causing your problem. They can't handle sustained data transfer through the system bus I believe.

[Lee Muller]

I used Pinnacle Studio 7 for about a year before I moved on to Canopus Edius and Premier. Studio 7 is identical to Studio 8 except it doesn't have the DVD authoring capabilities.

My main problems were, first of all, stability of the program, and second, outputting to tape, and if you check out the Pinnacle Forums you'll see that these problems are common. I solved the tape output by installing a second hard drive and reflashing my BIOS, but there were so many other problems that I just couldn't depend on the program to finish a project on time.

I had to move on to a more stable, and yes, more expensive program. I also upgraded my computer to be able to handle the new software.

I gotta tell you, that even after I upgraded my computer to dual xeon 3 gig processors and 2 gigs of ram , I still experienced the same problems with Studio, stability being the main one. My new software was more expensive, but it works, and never crashes. Go figure.

Lee

[Hank Freeman]

Any AVI captured by an interlaced device, IE your camcorder, will be seen as 'serrated' or jagged during quick motions on your computers, progressive scan monitor. This is normal. The effect will not be seen if you render to any format that is displayed on an interlace scanning tv. If your final product is to be view exclusively on a computer you can find a 'de-interlacing' software product on the web. It will remove the effect.

[Hank Freeman]

Oh, one other thing concerning studio 8.10.XX. Our TV station renders program exclusively using this product. It has bugs, but most are the result of 'clicking ahead' with your mouse. It is the best product, for the buck, by far for slam bam editing. It's not a product for commerical generation or creative leading edge effects. Their are many many better, but much more expensive. It has shortcomings but not many tv, 1/2 to 2 hour show rendering. DVD burning is very slow, but works fine in the newest version.

[Will Fastie]

I'll also chime in with a "bang for the buck" (or pound or euro) comment. There is no other product in the under-$100 segment that has the features or, more importantly, the integration. The user interface is clean and easy to understand. DVD authoring from the timeline is something the makers of more expensive software should be emulating.

I chose Studio 8 for a specific project and I will continue to use it.

However, it is the most bug-ridden program I can remember, which is saying something considering the thousands of personal computer software products I've examined, tested, or used over the past 25 years. It is absolutely unbelievable that major repairs are still being made 14 months after the product was initially released to the market (the most recent update was posted on October 22). 12-18 months is usually the timeframe for a new version of the product; Pinnacle has managed to miss the Christmas season with a new version and there remain many complaints of bugs.

If it weren't for the fact that the capture-edit-produce process was so beautifully integrated with Studio 8, I'd probably be using Video Factory, now Sony Screenblast Movie Studio (i.e., Vegas Jr.).

[Lee Muller]

I have to agree with Will Fastie and Hank Freeman - as far as "bang for the buck" goes, Studio 7 or 8 is hard to beat. But after a while all the bugs and workarounds just get be too much. If Pinnacle ever gets them all straightened out ........

Lee