Pinnacle Studio 11 - Copying Effects

[Greg Donovan]

I'm currently stuck using Pinnacle until I get some cash, but right now I've run into a small problem.

I have 5 video effects, all with custom settings, applied to a clip. What I am looking to do is to copy these effects to other clips in the timeline. Is that even possible with the Pinnacle interface?

I know I can copy all the effects and their settings into notepad and then select all the clips and apply the effects, but it would make a lot more sense and take less time if there was just a copy feature.

I'm sour enough already that I can't apply a vignette effect. It's quite likely that I will take this to school and use FCP just to apply the vignette once it is all cut.

Thanks everyone,
Greg

[Phil Seastrand]

I'm running Studio 12 and I can't find any way or reference in the help to do this. Sorry.

[Greg Donovan]

Thanks anyhow. I had a feeling that it couldn't be done. I've been using Pinnacle for a while now, and just wanted to make sure that I wasn't taking 5 minutes to do something that should only take 5 seconds.

I need to get some trials of Vegas and/or Premiere soon. Pinnacle is driving me insane.

Greg

[Kevin Lewis]

Greg & Phil:

How do you like Pinnicale overall? I had a trail version and it seemed fine. As a matter of fact i'm seriously thinking about getting it. I like some of the pre-packaged stuff that comes with it. The trail version did not seem to give me full access to everything. For example, I didnt seem to have acces to a simple cross fade. DOes Pinnicale inded have a cross fade transition?

[Greg Donovan]

Personally, I don't like Pinnacle. Though it seems that it is finally a stable program and while I generally only get a crash or two per project with version 11, it now autosaves properly and restores the project. I do still regularly get errors where the audio will stop playing, and previews will be almost unwatchable, requiring a restart of the program.

Pinnacle is decieving in the amount of pre-packaged materials. Most of the video and sound effects must be purchased separately, at very high cost, as well as anything more than simple fades or slide transistions. The included DVD menus are no better than home movie quality (for the most part) and the titling system I find very slow. All of this extra content that you can't use is the reason for the gigantic 10Gb footprint of Pinnacle, when it should really be under 1Gb for what you get.

My biggest problem is in the way it's timeline operates. It is not possible to have empty space between clips, which makes it difficult to reorganize clips in your timeline. For an actual project, you would need to create an empty title for every blackout you wanted. I find it very annoying.

The automated music scoring is nice, and the sound effect clips are alright (at least the ones you don't need to pay extra for).

I find that when I edit with Pinnacle, I'm fighting with the program to get my finished product rather than using it as a creative tool. I didn't find Pinnacle too bad until I first used Final Cut Pro and Express. Just the timeline operation alone makes a huge difference.

The one part of Pinnacle that I really like is the automatic scene detection while importing. It's likely that Final Cut, Adobe, and Vegas have a similar feature, but in Final Cut at least, it isn't as easily accessible.

If you can't justify the cost of a Mac and Final Cut Pro or Express (which to be frank, I certainly can't) I would look at Adobe Premiere or a comparable version of Sony Vegas. Once school is out I plan on really looking into what I can replace Pinnacle with. I know that now I'm pushing this program past its limits and I find that with DVD menus and credits especially, it is showing in my work. Whenever I can, I now render to file and use Windows DVD Maker in Windows 7 to burn my work. It creates stunning menus, albeit without proper chapters. This hasn't been a problem for me yet however.

Hope that helps you,
Greg

[Kevin Lewis]

Greg, thanks for your reply.

[Greg Donovan]

No problem. As far as the stability was concerned, I should have mentioned that I was comparing it to Pinnacle Studio 9, which I used previously and was nothing but a complete mess. I lost so much work. Studio 11 (and presumably 12) is considerably more reliable, but still not close to being in the league of Final Cut. I can't speak for Adobe or Vegas, as I don't have experience using them.

Greg

[Phil Seastrand]

For the home movies I edit I find Pinnacle Studio works fine. I think if I was trying to do any production type work, I would search for other solutions. Studio has it's issues and I think most of already been covered. I find it very easy and intuitive to work with. Every time I try a demo version of other software I stumble and struggle to make it work. This may be simply a factor of familiarity on my part with Studio. In any case, it does what I need and does it well enough that I'm not looking to change.

[Bruce Foreman]

Originally Posted by Greg Donovan

Personally, I don't like Pinnacle. Though it seems that it is finally a stable program and while I generally only get a crash or two per project with version 11, it now autosaves properly and restores the project. I do still regularly get errors where the audio will stop playing, and previews will be almost unwatchable, requiring a restart of the program.

This can often be an indication of not enough computer resources (memory, graphics memory, processor speed). What are you trying to edit? SD, HDV, AVCHD?

What processor is your machine running? Separate graphics card? How much memory on card?

Originally Posted by Greg Donovan

Pinnacle is decieving in the amount of pre-packaged materials. Most of the video and sound effects must be purchased separately, at very high cost, as well as anything more than simple fades or slide transistions. The included DVD menus are no better than home movie quality (for the most part) and the titling system I find very slow.

Most of that extra stuff is "glitzy" eyewash I wouldn't be caught dead using. Remember all the wipes used in the early Star Wars movies. Gave a "cartoonish" look. Good cinematic editing rarely uses anything other than cross dissolve or fade to black with fade up from black for next sequence. Page curls and stuff like that can detract from good work.

The included DVD menus have a few things I use but I frequently make my own, even including motion menus from something in the project. You cannot claim to be pushing the limits of anything as long as you depend on someone to "spoon feed" you "canned" stuff within the program.

Originally Posted by Greg Donovan

My biggest problem is in the way it's timeline operates. It is not possible to have empty space between clips, which makes it difficult to reorganize clips in your timeline. For an actual project, you would need to create an empty title for every blackout you wanted. I find it very annoying.

None of the packages I've looked at let you do this. Although the empty title is a perfect workaround you need it only if you need a "placeholder" marker sort of thing. To reorganize clips on the timeline all you need to do is click, drag, 'n drop" where you want it.

Originally Posted by Greg Donovan

The automated music scoring is nice, and the sound effect clips are alright (at least the ones you don't need to pay extra for).

When Pinnacle dropped real support for SmartSound I went with SonicFire Pro as I had a fair library of purchased discs from SmartSound. Now that they have gone with multi instrument layer music the ScoreFitter included with Studio 11 and 12 sounds too...Midi, not rich and full.

As far as sound effects, you may be better off doing you own. I do and they sound better than the ones in libraries. At least until you need car crashes and such, that could get expensive doing your own. I have one of those Zoom H2 recorders and that is an incredible little recorder for working with sound in general for such an inexpensive item.

Originally Posted by Greg Donovan

I find that when I edit with Pinnacle, I'm fighting with the program to get my finished product rather than using it as a creative tool. I didn't find Pinnacle too bad until I first used Final Cut Pro and Express. Just the timeline operation alone makes a huge difference.

Greg

Are you sure you're fighting with the program. You say you didn't find it too bad until you used something else that seemed to go easier. You have two choices here, either somehow make your self afford what you want and find more fulfilling to work with, or if that isn't on the table, adapt your own attitude and make what you have work for you.

While Pinnacle Studio is obviously not everyone's favorite, I have used it since the early StudioDV that came with a 1394 card. When offered the upgrades I went to version 7, 8, 9, 10 (very buggy!), 11, and am now runnning 12 Ultimate on a Core i7 based computer. I edit AVCHD 1920x1080 17Mbps video and the only thing I have to fight on the timeline may be the limits of my own imagination.

I find Pinnacle Studio to be the most fully featured, do everything (well, almost everything) in one package. I don't experience any of the transcoding and complex hoops to jump through I read about in a lot of these forums.

[Greg Donovan]

I'm running an Intel P8600 (2.26ghz) with 4Gb of DDR2-800 RAM. I am lacking in the video card department with only an Intel X4500 however. I'm only editing SD footage.

You are right in that it seems like the computer simply isn't powerful enough (from the way the program lags, etc) but I've used Pinnacle on a number of different machines, some less powerful, some moreso, and the result has always been about the same. The only difference is that I find it more reliable now that there have been sufficient updates.

I definitely agree that I would never, ever use any of those crazy transistions or much of the premium content. What annoys me is that you install this program, all of this material is installed with it and there are locks everywhere asking you to purchase it. It's a minor annoyance, but a lot of hard drive space. When I install it again (I reformated Windows) I'll have to see how much I can leave out and if having that much less data will help with the program performance.

There are a few decent DVD menus, and I agree that the menu maker is powerful enough to make some good menus yourself.

I do figure that I have an outlook on Pinnacle that's worse than it should be, probably because mentally I'm grouping all of my experiences with Pinnacle 9 and 11 together. For me at least, 9 was never reliable, 11 was a big improvement, yet the first real project took about 10 discs burnt before I got one that worked. A couple of months later came the patch to fix that. The problems that I wrote are definitely legitimate, I often have many problems with the previewing of the timeline, I find video stutters (even once rendered) and the audio will simply cut out completely, requiring a restart of the program. I'm glad that you've had a good experience with the program, but I have had issues.

Pinnacle has definitely come a long way, and I do plan on using it more to figure out how to get the most out of it. Maybe in the end I will stick with it, and I know for certain that FCP is far, far out of my price range. Adobe, however, isn't too much of a reach, considering that I need to purchase Photoshop, which is $250 (I think) at the education store, the entire CS4 production suite is $600. Feasible, but I will be working with Pinnacle for a while yet.

I find that Pinnacle does import quite well, and has an intuitive interface for it, as well as exporting. The color correction (premium, I have it because it came free with the preorder) filter is also quite powerful, with much more room for adjustment than even the 3 way color corrector in FCP (I'm not including Apple's "Color" program in this).

A lot of my opinion comes from regularly moving from using Final Cut Studio on a Mac Pro to Pinnacle on my laptop. There isn't much comparison. (and for a $1k price difference in the software alone, there shouldn't be)

Greg

[Bruce Foreman]

Greg,

I didn't mean to sound so much like coming down on you. I really meant to encourage you to either move to what you felt better about or make the most of what you had. I do understand the frustrations we all face.

Studio 9 finally became quite stable at 9.4.3 and at that version was much more stable than version 10. With version 10 they rewrote the package around the Liquid Edition "engine" and version 10 was very "buggy" for me until 10.7 which fixed the problems I had been having. In version 10 menus were "broke" which forced me to start using the menu editor to make my own, 10.7 fixed menus and then the first version of 11 found them "broke" again.

11.1.2 was very stable and I started editing AVCHD on a desktop quad core Q6600 but it took an Nvidia 8800GT card with 512 MB to handle it. And very slow at that as the Q6600 at 2.4Ghz was slower than Pinnacle recommended for 1920x1080 17Mbps video.

The biggest problem with Pinnacle Studio 11 and 12 is that it is a very resource hungry editing package and works best in a desktop with a very "healthy" graphics card. If you plan on staying with SD for awhile but may move up to HDV I would look for the best deal you can find on a really fast dual core machine that you can add a video card to later. I've never been happy trying to edit with Studio on a laptop, I've done it but they seem so sluggish.

Another package that is not so resource hungry is Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra. My only gripe about that one now is that when you add sound or music to the music/sound effects track you don't see the waveform (you do see it on the audio portion of the main video track on the timeline) and since I'm going to have to start doing some "double system" sound I need the waveform on all audio tracks for visual "synching". But PowerDirector 7 does render in far less time than Pinnacle Studio.

So I'm "stuck" with Pinnacle Studio 12 for now, it still offers more flexibility than anything else I've looked at in the lower price range.

[Greg Donovan]

No problem Bruce. I've since done a few more projects with Pinnacle, and I haven't experienced any major problems. After reinstalling Pinnacle (I swapped hard drive to an SSD) I haven't had the problem with audio cutting out in the middle of an edit and it has been working much smoother (likely the SSD at work, but it's an improvement nonetheless).

Yes, the program has limitations, but for the price of it there is little else that offers the same level of import->edit->dvd workflow that Pinnacle does. I'm not all that familiar with Vegas, but I believe it costs more than Pinnacle.

The ProDAD Vitascene program included with Ultimate is much more powerful than I expected. When I first tried the program (on another computer) it crashed almost immediately and I didn't have a chance to really see what it could do.

I've yet to use BIAS Soundsoap however, since I had activation problems that were only recently resolved.

I'd probably be more satisfied with Pinnacle if it weren't for the contrast of moving back and forth to Final Cut Studio 2 on a 2x Dual Core Xeon Mac Pro.

Thanks,
Greg