Help with editing . . . Pinnacle 15 is Driving me CRAZY!!!!

[Chris Mier]

I recently changed over to the GH2 (have 2 now) and I am trying to edit the video in Pinnacle 15, I have noticed that the audio is getting messed up when there are Transitions or Titles. Not all the time and sometimes when I play it the audio will be fine in one part and not in another. The next time I preview the video the audio will be messed up in another area. But the big problem is that I cannot get the video to completely process so that I can upload or burn it. it just freezes at this one point close to the end . . . .almost like it is teasing me!!! AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Has anyone else run into problems processing AVCHD videos in Pinnacle 15 HD? Could this be a graphics card issue? Please help I have 2 wedding videos that I need to edit and cannot finish them!


Thanks in advance , , , , you guys on here are always so helpful!!

Chris

[Patrick Janka]

Before I took video more seriously I use to edit with Pinnacle (versions 8 & 10, I think), and it would crash constantly. It would screw up my titles, and a host of other things. I can't imagine it's gotten much better. I'd suggest upgrading to Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.

[Philip Hinkle]

Pinnacle is known to be very buggy and your problems are probably all related to the compression of the AVCHD codec files you are editing and possibly the computer not quite up to the task. If you are on a PC you really need a pretty good one to edit natively (i7 processor). Vegas and Premiere will be better than Pinnacle and I will throw in my editing application, Edius, as another alternative. Very stable, very fast and can edit native AVCHD files on an i7 almost like they were AVI files. Any of those 3 apps would be a big improvement over Pinnacle.

[Bill Koehler]

I used Pinnacle Studio up through version 11. The moment I went to second system sound I had to go with another editor. Playback would be fine on the editor timeline but the burned DVD would have sound up to two seconds out of sync.

So you are discovering as well going multitrack with Pinnacle involves problems.
What a shocking surprise. NOT.

I ended up with Sony Vegas.
I would suggest giving Sony Vegas Movie Studio & Adobe Premiere Elements trial versions a shot and see what works best for you.

[Bruce Foreman]

Originally Posted by Patrick Janka

Before I took video more seriously I use to edit with Pinnacle (versions 8 & 10, I think), and it would crash constantly. It would screw up my titles, and a host of other things. I can't imagine it's gotten much better. I'd suggest upgrading to Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.

Version 8 added DVD authoring and burning, early versions were problematic for some but updates eventually brought Version 8 up to working on my PC at the time.

Then along came Version 9. Version 9.4.3 was very stable even on my single core machine.

Version 10 was a disaster. They rewrote Studio around the Liquid Edition "engine" and it took Version 10.5 to get it stable, 10.7 worked great on a dual core processor.

11 was the first version to really work with AVCHD, by that time I had ordered a Q6600 quad core based machine but hadn't paid attention to the minimum specs required for 17Mbps AVCHD. 2.66GHz clock speed minimum, I had 2.4 and at first had to set the camera to 12Mbps but changing to an NVidia 8800GT 512MB graphics card did let me go back to the higher bitrate.

Version 12.1 has been very stable and I still have it on the Q6600 machine.

Pinnacle Studio is probably the most resource hungry NLE out there if you're editing AVCHD in any form, so today it needs a 2nd gen Intel Core i7 to deal with it right. That's what I have now and Avid Pinnacle Studio 15 rolls like a dream with both Canon HF100 AVCHD 17Mbps files and with Canon DSLR 1920x1080 MOV files with no transcoding. I just drop them on the timeline and go to work.

Originally Posted by Philip Hinkle

Pinnacle is known to be very buggy and your problems are probably all related to the compression of the AVCHD codec files you are editing and possibly the computer not quite up to the task. If you are on a PC you really need a pretty good one to edit natively (i7 processor). Vegas and Premiere will be better than Pinnacle and I will throw in my editing application, Edius, as another alternative. Very stable, very fast and can edit native AVCHD files on an i7 almost like they were AVI files. Any of those 3 apps would be a big improvement over Pinnacle.

As mentioned above certain versions were buggy, I have heard the same about some other NLEs when folks ran into complications.

I'm learning Edius Neo 3 (slowly) and am quite impressed with it. But the combination of my current HP with 2nd gen i7 2600 processor and Avid's Pinnacle Studio 15 is amazing (almost wish I'd spent the extra money and gone with a Core i7 six core processor!).

Chris, if you are trying to work with Studio and anything less than a quad core at better than 2.66GHz clock speed, it's not going to work well. I would suggest going with a new machine based on a 2nd gen Core i7 processor. Made all the difference to me.

Studio 15 is supposed to work with AVCHD Lite which is what I believe your GH cams use. Today's highly compressed HD video chokes a lot of computer/NLE combos that used to handle HDV quite well.

[Jeff Harper]

Chris, please tell us what processor you are using, how much ram you have, graphics card, and power supply you're using, and which version of Windows you are using. It does sound like your system is underpowered or misconfigured. Are you overclocked?